


Blood Oranges

by crabapplered



Category: One Piece, Vampire: The Masquerade
Genre: AU, Action/Adventure, Multi, Self-Harm, Vampires
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-30
Updated: 2016-10-25
Packaged: 2018-07-19 07:10:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 25,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7351012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crabapplered/pseuds/crabapplered
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vampire AU. The vampire gang shouldn't have spotted her sneaking away with their money, but now Nami is on the run through the swamps with angry vampires on her heels. When she runs into Zoro and Luffy, however, the rescue drags her and everyone they meet into Luffy's crazy schemes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The smell of the bayou is heavy in the air. The scent green things growing and rotting, living and dying, of semi-stagnant water, of mud, of dead fish and reptile musk.  
  
The last has Nami blearily checking for gators as she stumbles down the marshy bank. She's long since lost her sandals. Her bare toes squelch in mud slippery with algae. There's sharp rocks cutting into her feet, and broken glass and rusted scrap metal of someone's garbage carelessly dumped here, but the pain is an unimportant detail.  
  
What's important is the briefcase she's got clumsily strapped to her back with her belt. It's heavy. The corners dig into her flesh as she runs. It stinks of cologne and cigarette smoke. It is worth more then her life.  
  
What's important are the people chasing her. They have guns and knives and fangs and a rage so strong she can feel it lapping at her back. The Red Smiles might be a shitty little gang in the big city of New Orleans, but it's more then enough to take out one lone woman, and they've got over ten thousand motives to kill her, all of them strapped to her back in an ugly black leather suitcase. And they're all proper vampires, not weak blooded and outcast like herself. It's only a matter of time before the older members recover and come after her, too.  
  
What's important is how tired she is. She hadn't expected a chase. She'd expected to play a newbie gang against an experienced drug runner and make off with the cash in the confusion. A sleight of hand. Little risk. Big reward. Loaded dice, if you will.  
  
A month of planning and four hundred dollars blown on supplies, and those dice had still managed to come up snake eyes.  
  
It had started so well, too. The setup was everything she could have asked for: a bunch of incompetents tangling in business above their pay grade in an old warehouse out by the Turning Basin's scrap yards. Money, scapegoats, easily accessible entrance and getaway. As soon as a plan had blossomed in her mind she'd unhesitatingly blown her precious personal savings on a pair of black market grenades. You had to spend money to make money, right?  
  
The day before the swap she'd gone to the warehouse and slipped into the rafters. There she'd waited for a day and a night, patient as a cat at a mousehole. She'd watched the two groups arrive, the drug runner and bodyguards in his massive black SUV, the Red Smiles arriving rag tag on motorcycles painted with carnival designs, their helmets done up to look like clown masks. Everyone's hands had lingered near gun holsters and baseball bats, and their heads had never stopped moving, side to side, side to side, scanning the grounds for cops, for spies.  
  
None of them looked up. None of them saw the smoke grenade tumbling down from above. And then it was too late and the whole place flooded with thick grey clouds.  
  
She'd pushed her powers to their limits to duplicate the briefcase and wrap herself in a shell of shadows. Two illusions was just barely in her power, and then only because the smoke helped hide so many details. Then she'd lept into the screaming chaos bellow, dodging gunfire and flailing arms, fingers wrapping around the leather of the briefcase and hauling it in.  
  
She'd expected to skitter out in the confusion and leave the two groups to accuse each other. She'd expected to hunker down in the junkyard outside, snack on rats if she had to, wait until they killed each other off and then make her slow way back to the city.  
  
 Instead the smoke had dissipated faster then she'd expected in the wide area of the warehouse, and the illusions she'd spent so much strength on crafting had vanished with it. The fake briefcase popped out of existence like a soap bubble. The feeble shield that kept her invisible dissolved under searching glares. She'd been left out in the open and holding the money.  
  
She'd bolted.  
  
The flash grenade she dropped behind her had provided her with a bare few minutes of lead. From there she'd scrambled through the junkyard and fled east. They had motorcycles (fast, very fast) and baseball bats (dangerous, deadly wood) and too many people (so many hands to rip and tear.) Her only chance was to lose them in the bayou.  
  
How far has she gone down the long stretch of the outflow canal? She'd lost track the same as she lost her sandals, to sucking mud and blind terror that keeps her moving forward, forward, forward even when there's no hope. Her long, coppery hair falls in clumps about her face, sticking to her skin and tangling in her mouth. She's out of tricks and out of power, her body trembling, stumbling, feet numb. She is going to die in this putrid bayou, ten thousand dollars her greatest and last heist, torn apart by the straggling few gang members who've managed to keep up despite her best efforts.  
  
There's only four of them left.  
  
That's eight hands to rip off her limbs and scatter them, forty fingers to dig into her flesh, leave her a mutilated wreck out in the open to await the sun. The boss of the Red Smile's calling card is dismemberment, and the rest of his gang gleefully follow suit.  
  
If only she wasn't so _hungry_. Her fangs have fully extended and they ache with thirst for blood. All she needs is a drop, a mouthful, a swallow - even a gator would do now. Just enough to let her weave one last shadow and shelter in the branches of the cypress.  
  
_Escape-! I have to- Please, I just want to get away! **I can't die here-!**_  
  
There is an overturned rowboat ahead of her.  
  
Her eyes widen.  
  
There is an overturned rowboat ahead of her, half-sunk in the mud, the curve of its hull highlighted by moonlight. She can see it rocking.  
  
Movement . . . An animal?  
  
Please, please let it be an animal! Sweet life to bolster her own! Hope carries her forward the last few yards, and her heart leaps when an arm pokes up from under the boat. Not just an animal, but a human! Food of the best kind!  
  
She dives for it, heedless of mud and rocks and garbage. Her fingers close around the wrist. Her fangs sink into flesh.  
  
It is the best thing-  
  
**_GAH!_**  
  
It is the _worst_ thing she has ever tasted!  
  
She spits it out before she can take even a mouthful of whatever gunk is flowing in those veins. Hacking and retching, she scoops muddy water into her mouth to kill the taste, then spits again.  
  
"That _hurt!_ " says whoever is under that rowboat. A few moments of frantic thrashing as they crawl out and then a muddy Chinese guy is hauling himself to his feet beside her. "Don't bite me!"  
  
He grabs her by the hair, yanks her head up, and she has just enough time to see his fist coming before he's punched her square in the nose.  
  
Nami topples over backwards clutching her face, her head ringing, her guts knotting up with nausea. What the hell-? Who the hell-?  
  
"There," he says. "Now we're even. Don't do it again, okay?"  
  
He wipes his hands off on his baggy jean shorts, then reaches over his shoulder to pull up a battered straw hat. He gives it a quick once over before cramming it on his head, bends over and fishes a pair of sandals out from under the boat.  
  
Screw this guy. Nami crawls through the mud toward the boat. She scrabbles at the hull, trying to flip the thing, but it's far beyond her flagging strength.  
  
Mister Straw Hat cocks his head. "What are you doing?"  
  
"What's it look like, you idiot?" she snaps at him. "I'm trying to flip this boat so I can _leave_."  
  
"Because I punched you?"  
  
"Because there are guys coming who want to _kill me!_ "  
  
"Oh." He chews that over for a few seconds. "That sucks. But you can't take the boat. It's our only one."  
  
She gapes at him helplessly. "But- But I-"  
  
He points at something behind her. "Are those the guys who want to kill you?"  
  
Yes, those are the guys that want to kill her. Their motorcycle leathers are torn and spattered with mud from the chase, and they've left their painted helmets behind, but the faces revealed aren't much better then the fake clown faces: bared fangs, wild eyes, hair shaved and dyed into carnival sculptures. They've kept their weapons, though. Two of them have baseball bats, the third has a shotgun, the fourth an enormous hunting knife.  
  
"Gonna fuck you up, little girl," one of the bat-holders growls.  
  
"Peel your face off and leave you for the sun," says the one with the knife.  
  
The shotgun comes up and its safety clicks off. "But first, we're gonna kill your dippy friend."  
  
"Hey, don't point that this way," says Straw Hat. "You'll damage the-"  
  
Nami is moving before she can think which is good because it's just enough to let her grab one of Straw Hat's ankles and yank, sending him sprawling moments before the shotgun fires and blows a palm-sized hole in the boat.  
  
"Awww, shit," groans Straw Hat around his mouthful of mud.  
  
And then the boat _erupts_.  
  
No, wait, what was inside of it erupts, slicing the hull of the boat in half and surging to its feet, heedless of the wreckage falling in two neat slices to either side of him like the empty shell of a quartered melon.  
  
"That's how we lost the last one," Straw Hat says sadly. He sits up and readjusts his hat. "Thanks for that, though. They might have ruined my hat with that shot."  
  
Nami gapes at him. At them both. "Your _hat?_ What about your _head?_ "  
  
"He doesn't need it," says the man who has impossibly -but very definitely- just cut the rowboat in half. Presumably with the two katana he's holding. "Oi, Luffy. What's going on?"  
  
Straw Hat shrugs. "Dunno. This lady showed up and tried to steal our boat, and then these assholes came and shot a hole in it."  
  
The swordsman glares at the gang members. A long vertical scar has left him with only the one eye, but it's more than capable of showing enough menace for two. "You guys looking for a fight?"  
  
The gangster with the shotgun sneers. "Lookit you actin' tough. Only a dumbass brings knives to a gunfi-"  
  
He is dead. His head is three feet away, flung aside by the force of the katana sent ripping through his neck and the swordsman is standing there, right next to the collapsing body and Nami didn't even see him move.  
  
Before anyone else can react, Straw Hat, no, Luffy, stands up and cracks his neck. "Your dead friend called you a dumbass," he solemnly tells the gangster with the knife. "So I guess it was good that Zoro killed him for you. Or did you like him calling you names?"  
  
"T-that loser? No way! I woulda killed him myself if you didn't!" the unfortunate man blusters.  
  
Luffy says, "Wow. You're a dick." Then he moves, as fast as Zoro, from here to there in an instant but it's not a blade he uses, it's his fist, and it goes right through the face the poor dumb fuck with the knife. Blood and brains and bone spatter everywhere in a gory firework display.  
  
Luffy pulls his hand back with a horrible wet slurp. "I hate people who turn on their friends."  
  
The last two of the gang members have drawn together, their eyes so wide the whites show in pale halos around the irises, the wobble of their baseball bats betraying the trembling of their limbs.  
  
"You want left or right, Luffy?" asks Zoro.  
  
"Zoro's letting me chose?"  
  
"I always let you chose, moron."  
  
Luffy's laughter is the soft hissing of a viper, his smile flashes a serpent's delicate fangs. "Yeah, that's true. Zoro's nice that way." He looks consideringly at the pair. "I don't really feel like running, so I guess I'll take which ever is slowest?"  
  
"Sounds good. Hey, you two," says Zoro, stalking toward them like a tiger, his own fangs bared and his enormous blades like gleaming claws. "You heard Luffy. Start running so we can see which of you is slowest."  
  
If Nami hadn't seen these strangers move, she'd have sworn the fleeing gang members were the fastest things on two legs. As it was they give an impressive go for second best, each of them scrambling to prove that they are much, much faster then their unlucky partner. They disappear into the bayou within seconds, back the way they came to go cower at their boss' feet.  
  
Or maybe not. Buggy isn't known for his mercy to failures.  
  
And then Zoro turns his blazing glare on her. "What about the woman?"  
  
"It's fine. I already punched her for biting me."  
  
It's like a switch is flipped. That menacing aura about Zoro vanishes, and instead there's just a slouching, cranky Japanese man with scars all over his naked chest and a pair of swords in his hands. Zoro grunts and turns away, flicking his blades clean of blood and sheathing them in a single, smooth motion. It looks natural, practiced. It's possibly the _only_ natural thing about him.  
  
Luffy might act a bit odd between the ears, but he at least looks normal in his shabby red tank top and baggy jean shorts, like one of the many Chinese tourists turned beach bum on their vacation. Zoro looks like he should be on the cover of some Urban Fantasy romance novel: loose black sweat pants, a pair of goddamn katana at his side, combat boots and, of course, he's shirtless to display his impressive musculature. A shame the front of him is so battered with scars.  
  
Not the back, though. Weird.  
  
_Oh, and of course his ear is pierced_ , she thinks. _And . . ._ She peers at him closely through the night gloom of the bayou. Is his hair is green? _Yes, yes it is. Because why even try for normal?_  
  
Zoro kicks idly at one of the corpses. "What d'you wanna do with the bodies, boss?"  
  
"We could eat 'em," Luffy suggests.  
  
These two just get more insane with every word from their mouths. "How are you so strong when you're so dumb?" she moans.  
  
They glance back at her, faces creased in identical frowns.  
  
Zoro fingers the hilt of one of his katana. "You got a problem with us having dinner?"  
  
"Of course I do! That's diablerie, you sword waving maniac," she snarls. Dimly, she realizes that she's finally blown right through her fear and out the other side into a blissful state of not giving a shit.  
  
"Diabluwha?" says Luffy.  
  
"What d'you say about my swords?"  
  
"I didn't say anything about your swords, I said something about _you!_ And I called you a maniac because you are one! What kind of idiot walks around looking like an escapee from a samurai film? Are you _trying_ to get yourself burnt at the stake for violating the Masquerade?"  
  
The pair rear back from her, wide eyed.  
  
Luffy's mouth curls into an enormous grin. "You know about the Masked Raid! Zoro, she knows! See, I told you we'd find someone to explain!"  
  
Nami feels her heart sinking into the mud beside her. Oh no.  
  
"Guess so. Good thing, too, I was getting sick of having to kill those jackasses who kept chasing us down to yell at us." Zoro pauses. "Got some good fights out of it, though. That Scourge guy at Orange Beach wasn't bad."  
  
"Yeah, that was fun," Luffy agrees, and inside Nami is shrieking.  
  
A Scourge might be the lowest on ladder of officials in a vampire court, little more then a dog sent out to hunt trespassers, but they're still powerful vampires accustomed to slaying their own kind. That these two nobodies talk so casually about killing one tells her that this little display against the Red Smiles was nothing but parlour tricks . . . And that in addition to being clueless about the Masquerade and the taboo on cannibalism between vampires, they're also ignorant about local politics and probably the Camarilla at large.  
  
No matter how dangerous they might seem, they are nothing compared to what the Camarilla can bring down on them once provoked. Killing officials, violating the Masquerade and god knows what else . . . These two are headed for death.  
  
_Unless someone teaches them better_ , whispers a little voice inside her head.  
  
She squashes it firmly. She has no room for anyone else in her life. She's already shouldered the burden of three people. Two more will surely crush her.  
  
Luffy's stare seems to drill right into her face, digging, digging, and whatever he finds seems to please him, because he grins even wider. "What's your name?"  
  
"Nami," she says, slurring a little from her fangs' hyper-extension. She is still desperately hungry and her brain feels like it's slowly sinking into the mud with the rest of her, too tired to even bother lying about her name, but she forces it to at least try to work. She has to find some way of ditching these idiots before she can get tangled in their dangerous fate.  
  
"Great. Nami can be our Masked Raider, then, and tell us what not to do."  
  
"What? NO!" she squawks before she can stop herself. No, no, no! It can't be too late already, right?  
  
"It's too late," says Zoro. He's crouched down by the edge of the water, peering into the duckweed. "Give up now and save yourself the effort. It'll be less embarrassing in the long run."  
  
"Zoro took a lot of convincing," Luffy tells her with a fond glance at Zoro's turned back.  
  
"That was fucking _blackmail_ , you little shit!"  
  
Luffy just laughs again, that odd, hissing laughter and the fanged grin that somehow manages to simultaneously light up his face with childlike delight and make him look like a crazed demon.  
  
There's a sudden splash. Zoro's gripping the thrashing brown coils of a Cottonmouth viper. He snaps the neck with a casual twist, then trots over to her and thrusts its dripping corpse in her face. "Here. You're hungry, right?"  
  
She eyes him and the snake, neither inspiring confidence, but he just waits patiently, scarred face showing nothing but boredom, and finally she takes the creature from his hand. Any port in a storm.  
  
Her fangs sink past the rough scales. The snake's blood is cooled and sour on her tongue, but it still quenches the hunger that had been smouldering in her guts like live coals. Her feet tingle as life flows back into them, the fog clears from her mind, and she is becoming uncomfortably aware of how much she now owes these two.    
  
People live and die through favours owed in the dark world of vampires. To refuse to honour a debt can be just as deadly as violating the Masquerade. Wouldn't it be better to clear her debt to Luffy and Zoro now, before she's forced to do it when the Camarilla sends its Sheriffs after the pair?  
  
She chews her lower lip. Finally, she says, "Look, I'm not going to babysit you and make sure you don't violate the Masquerade, okay? Get someone else to teach you. But I can take you to New Orleans and buy you a new rowboat to go back home with, if you want."  
  
"The boat was our home," says Luffy. "Zoro and I have been traveling! We wanted to go to the Bahamas."  
  
"From Orange Beach?!" Nami sputters, incredulous.  
  
"Naw, from Miami. Orange Beach is just where we wound up." Luffy shrugs when Nami boggles at him and adds, "Zoro was steering," as if it explains everything.  
  
At first it doesn't seem as if Zoro is listening, kicking at the wreck of their boat and staring out across the waters of the Bienvenue Central Wetland. Then he turns to look back at her, frowning. "Going to New Orleans sounds good, but I'm not sure about having to swim across the Okeechobee," he says.  
  
Maybe 'Zoro was steering' _does_ explain everything.  
  
Nami keeps that to herself, though. All she says is, "I promise there'll be no swimming," which seems to satisfy Zoro well enough.  
  
Luffy helps her clamber out of the mud. His hand is strong and ropey with tendon, his nails are chipped and bitten. His skin is warm. It makes Nami shiver. No dead thing should be warm like this, feel alive like this. And for a moment, she doubts that he is actually a vampire.  
  
But she saw his fangs, like slender little daggers. She saw him move, inhumanly fast and deadly. And now, looking into his dark eyes, she sees the Beast lurking within: an insatiable hunger, a mocking hell-ape, a laughing devil ready to slay anything that stands in its way.  
  
Luffy is no more mortal then she is. He might not be what she's used to, but he's a predator, through and through.  
  
_And he's not . . . one of those. Like Arlong_. She pushes that thought away quickly. Now is not the time.  
  
"Then it's settled. I'll take you into New Orleans and get you a new rowboat, and then we're even."  
  
Luffy just smiles in answer.


	2. Chapter 2

In the end, she doesn't take them directly to the city. The only easy road there is back the way she came and through the junkyard and she isn't sure if Buggy's crew will still be there. Instead she decides to take them east through the swamp to Paris road, a thin strip of land slicing the bayou in two, its length decorated with marinas and bait shops and tourist traps. She can find Luffy a boat there, and hopefully, some new sandals for herself.  
  
It's a long hike, made longer by the sweltering June heat, the heavy weight of the briefcase still strapped to her back, and the cuts and blisters lacing the bottom of her bare feet. The sound of frogs and crickets is so loud about her the air seems to thrum with it. The smell of water and green things clogs her nose. Above her, the stars are barely visible past the haze of city light and pollution. She strains her eyes to see them. They're her best guides out here in dark and the wet.  
  
Luffy amuses himself by trying to make fart noises in the mud as he walks. Zoro spends his time scanning the water, the ground, the trees. He cocks his head. His earrings jingle. It's the only warning they get before he lunges at a long shape stretched across the bank. There's a brief moment of thrashing violence, the flutter of wings as nearby ducks are startled into flight, the splash of water. Then he's coming back to them, a gator as long as he is tall cradled in his arms like a child, its powerful jaws held shut by one of his hands. Luffy is enchanted and makes them pause for a bit to admire the thing.  
  
"Its tummy is so smooth," he says, rubbing it gently. "Try it, Nami!"  
  
She reaches out without hesitation. The belly of the creature is smooth scales, a little slippery with mud, a little rough from wear. She can feel its breath in the swell and shrink of its flesh. Can dimly sense its heartbeat.   
  
She looks at Luffy's pleased grin, then into Zoro's bored eye, and realizes suddenly that she's trusting them.  
  
She snatches her hand back. Turns away. How stupid of her.  
  
"Can we eat it?" asks Luffy.  
  
Zoro says, "Don't see why not. Unless it's more diablewatsit."  
  
"Diablerie," Nami corrects him. "And that's only if you cannibalize another vampire."  
  
"Great! Let's eat then!" Luffy reaches for the gator only to have it swung out of his reach. "Aw, Zoro~"  
  
"I go first! Otherwise there'll be nothing left."  
  
"But I'm-"  
  
Nami ignores their squabbling in favour of sitting down on a nearby log and gingerly massaging her feet. Her soles are a ragged mess at this point. Splinters, cuts, god knows what kind of gunk ground into them . . . . They'll heal, of course. She might be a weak-blooded thing, but she's still vampire enough to recover better then any mortal. But until she can clean the wounds and pick out any wooden slivers she'll have to suffer.  
  
Luffy comes over to her and stares at the wreckage of her feet. "You should really put some shoes on."  
  
"Yes, thank you, I know," she snaps. "And if I had some, I would."  
  
He frowns. "I thought girls always packed extra shoes with their clothing."  
  
Now she's frowning too. "What clothing?" Then she realizes too late what he must think. "Oh, the briefcase? Um, no, that's-"  
  
"Money," says Zoro. He wipes the blood from his mouth and sets down the alligator, and the look on his face now is anything but bored.  
  
Nami suddenly feels very, very cold.   
  
Zoro grins. "Thought so. Those bikers would only have come after you in the swamp for a handful of reasons, and the way you've guarded that suitcase says it all. Didn't smell drugs on you. Had to be money. You stole it from them, right?"  
  
Her fists tighten. She is painfully aware that there is nothing she can do against them, no lie she can risk, no weapon in her hand. "Yes."  
  
"Gbooooooooool," says Luffy around his mouthful of gator, clearly delighted.   
  
"Pretty ballsy," Zoro agrees.  
  
Then they turn back to the alligator. Luffy sucks it dry, making disgusting slurping sounds and giggling as the corpse folds in on itself like a giant reptilian raisin, Zoro's rough chuckles a soft counterpoint.   
  
Nami watches them. She feels like she's drifting in the dark water around them. Lost. Unmoored. Zoro at least should know how much money has to be in the suitcase to have made the Red Smiles come after her, but he clearly doesn't care, and Luffy isn't even curious. These two had apparently been living in a single rowboat, likely have nothing more to their names then what they're standing in, and they don't give a damn that thousands of dollars are two feet away. She doesn't understand it.  
  
She can't understand it. Can't even _imagine_ a life where money isn't a looming, all-consuming _monster_.  
  
 _Lucky assholes_ , she thinks bitterly. _Lucky fucking assholes._   
  
She hates them.  
  
"Well, if you don't have extra shoes then I'll just have to carry you," Luffy says, breaking into her thoughts.  
  
She looks up at him, startled. "Carry me?"  
  
"Yeah, piggyback. We'll go a lot faster and your feet won't hurt. Zoro can carry your suitcase."  
  
"Oi. Don't volunteer me to be a packmule."  
  
"He promises not to drop it in the river," Luffy continues blithely. He turns around and crouches. "So c'mon."  
  
It's like a dream. She finds herself unstrapping the belt and handing Zoro the briefcase. He takes it like it's nothing. Like it's the suitcase of clothing like Luffy thought, and not enough cash to buy them a yacht, never mind a rowboat. Because he genuinely does not give a shit.  
  
She settles onto Luffy's back. It's lean and narrow - he's still got the traces of a teenager. Was he turned at eighteen? Nineteen? It's a bit harder for her to judge in someone Chinese. Then he stands and she goes up, his hands grip her thighs, her face tucks into the curve of his neck and shoulder.   
  
He feels warm all over. Her legs tighten around him. Her arms slip across his chest. She breaths deep despite herself. He smells of swamp and reptile and musk. He laughs his serpent laugh and she feels it vibrate through her whole body. "Alright! Let's go!"  
  
And then they are running and it's like they're flying, Luffy and Zoro matching strides easily and racing across the swampland, leaping from hummock to tree root to log to marshy bank, all effortless and at speeds she'd never imagined. She'd known there were vampires who could out-pace a mortal, but this-! It's the ground devouring lope of a wolf pack. It's the graceful sprint of a gazelle.   
  
"Which way, which way?" crows Luffy. He goes where she points, a racing wind under her command, with Zoro a faithful shadow. She leans into the breeze and lets it rush across her face and through her hair and laughs and Luffy and Zoro laugh with her. For the first time in years she feels untainted delight in simply being, living-unliving, seeing and feeling. Free.  
  
She loves them.  
  
Just for this moment. Just a little.  
  
~  
  
Despite it being past midnight there is still the bustle of human tourists along the stretch of Paris road. Night fishing, swamp tours, people looking to simply boat around on the cool, dark waters of the bayou. There are motels here, in between the many marinas, and restaurants, and best of all, convenience stores. Nami steers her two-legged steed toward one of these last.  
  
It's a low building cradled by overgrown shrubs, its barred windows filled with posters for beer and off-brand candy, it's parking lot a tiny asphalt oasis of shadow and potholes. The trio linger by the back door, hidden by dumpsters and stacks of cardboard boxes.  
  
"First thing is to get me some shoes," Nami says. "Zoro, hide your swords behind the dumpster."  
  
"Are you crazy?!" he snaps, hands dropping to the hilts of his blades.  
  
"You can't come inside with them," she hisses. "If anyone sees them there'll be trouble for sure. The humans might even call the cops!"  
  
He sneers, showing fangs. "Let them. I'll cut them to pieces."  
  
"You- Ugh. Fine. Then stay out here with the suitcase. _Don't_ let anyone see you."  
  
"Yeah, yeah." He slides down the cement wall to settle himself in the shadows, arms folding across his chest, briefcase tucked against his side.  
  
"And give me some money. The briefcase shouldn't be locked, and it should mostly be in twenties. I just need a couple."  
  
She watches him closely as he opens the briefcase. Thick stacks of twenties and fifties are neatly snuggled into rows, but they might as well be old socks for all the interest he shows as he slides a few bills out for her. As for Luffy, he's jouncing her about as he dances in place, delighting in the sight of moths fluttering around a street light.  
  
"That one's huge and it's got tails! Wow! Look, Zoro, it's green like your hair!"  
  
No gold fever. Her guts finally unknot - it had been her last big concern. Even the most Spartan of people can get overwhelmed by the sight of so much money.  
  
"Shoes first, bugs after," she says firmly.  
  
Luffy grumbles, but carries her inside.  
  
The store is dimly lit and littered with garbage pretending to be souvenirs, gossip magazines, snacks, cigarette cartons. The place is deserted but for the clerk slumped behind the counter, a matronly old white lady with a cigarette clamped between her withered lips, her grey hair yellowed and her eyes rheumy. She takes one look at them and snaps upright. "Stop right there, you hooligans! What d'you think you're doing coming into my store like that? This ain't some slap-dash place you can play your silly games in."  
  
"We're just here to buy me some shoes," Nami says in her best soothing tone.  
  
"So you're too good to walk in here barefoot, is that it? Don't think my floor's clean?"  
  
Nami feels Luffy swell as his shoulders tense and his hands grip her thighs tighter. She glances at his face and is surprised to see him scowling. "Nami's feet are hurt," he says. "And if she walks she'll get blood everywhere."  
  
"What?!" The old woman bustles out from behind the counter. "Oh, my sweet Lord. Child, what have you been doing to yourself?"  
  
Nami has to stifle a smile. She knows that tone. This woman isn't just matronly, she's motherly, and Nami knows exactly how to wrap such people around her finger.   
  
She lowers her lashes and bites her lip delicately. "I was out in the bayou with a- a friend in his boat. He said we'd just be going fishing and maybe see the gators but he, well. And he wouldn't take me back, so I . . . Got out and started walking."  
  
"In the bayou?" sputters the old woman. "At night? You know what's in those waters? Snakes and gators and Lord knows what else!"  
  
Nami puts some extra tearful warble in her voice. "I- I know, but it was better then staying in that boat with that awful jerk! He wouldn't take no for an answer and he-" she cuts herself off, looking away and faking a sob. "But I lost my shoes in the mud and got cut up. And then Luffy found me, but he wrecked his boat coming to get me because it was so dark, so he carried me all the way back!"  
  
"Well now." The clerk looks at Luffy admiringly. "Ain't you just a gentleman. And so nice to know that there's good men to look out for a girl when others turn out bad." She pats Luffy's shoulder. "You sit her down on the counter top while I get the first aid kit."  
  
Luffy settles Nami with surprising gentleness. The effect is undone, though, when he grabs her ankle and yanks her foot up so he can stare at the base. "Yuck," is his diagnosis.  
  
She rolls her eyes. "Thanks."  
  
"You made me sounds like a loser for crashing my boat."  
  
"Well, I couldn't exactly tell her the truth," Nami says. "You and Zoro might like to make a scene, but the whole point of the Masquerade is to keep humans from knowing that vampires exist. So you have to careful not to do weird things."  
  
Luffy pouts at her and begins picking his nose. "That sounds boring."  
  
"Stop that, that's disgusting. And it's only boring if you're stupid and don't know when and how it's okay to be flashy."  
  
"And Nami knows?"  
  
"Yes." Mostly. She's had to learn through spying on more powerful vampires, picking up scraps of information here and there, bribing it out of others, always walking the narrow tightrope to keep people from guessing how ignorant (how weak) she truly is.   
  
Luffy gives her that enormous grin. "That's why you should stay, Nami! So you can tell me what to do!"  
  
"Oh my, marriage proposals already?" titters the old bat as she shuffles back to them with the first aid kit.   
  
Nami very carefully does not try to slap some sense into her. The woman's obviously gone senile. No need to rattle the few wits she has left. Instead Nami says, "I promised Luffy I'd replace his rowboat. Do you know anyone who has one for sale?"  
  
"Now let me see. I _think_ there was a notice posted at the Tin Bell Marina. Oh! Are you sure you don't want my help with that?" The old woman winces as Nami starts dabbing at the mess of her feet.  
  
"No, it's alright. It looks worse than it is," says Nami, carefully wiping at her feet with alcohol swabs from the kit. Once the gunk is gone it really doesn't look too bad. A few splinters she carefully pulls out with the kit's tweezers, a couple of deep cuts that bleed sluggishly. She layers clean gauze on the bottom of her feet and wraps it with medical tape to keep it snug in place. It should heal by tomorrow night if she's lucky and well fed.   
  
Luffy looks dubiously at her rough handywork. "It's like you're wearing really ugly slippers. Are you gonna be able to walk like that?"  
  
"Absolutely not!" The meddling old biddy shakes her finger in Nami's face. "I know you young people refuse to go to hospitals and there's nothing I can do, but you should at least not go traipsing about and make it worse." She turns to Luffy. "You make sure she doesn't take another step, you hear me? Get her home!"  
  
"'Kay." He looks at Nami. "Are we still gonna buy you shoes?"  
  
She sighs heavily. "No, I guess there's no point."  
  
He brightens. "Then can I have a candy bar?"  
  
She boggles at him. Food? He wants human food? "I- I guess? Hey! You said a candy bar, not seventeen! Put those back!"  
  
"But I want to try them all," he whines piteously.  
  
"Try them when it's on your own budget!"   
  
The old lady's laughter trails them out once they've paid, Luffy humming happily around his mouthful of chocolate. Nami's view is all too close and personal for her taste - she feels vaguely ill at the scent of sugar and chemical flavouring, and even more so at the sight of it going into Luffy's mouth. She'd heard rumours of vampires who could eat, but she hadn't imagined any of them would actually enjoy it. Mortal food is just so bland compared to blood.  
  
They rejoin Zoro behind the building. He's slumped in on himself, head hanging low, eye closed and mouth a little slack.  
  
"Is he. . . asleep?"   
  
"Yeah, Zoro has to nap a lot since he stays awake all day," Luffy says, spewing bits of chocolate everywhere. He kicks at Zoro's shoulder a few times. The man grumbles and twitches, but stays put. "Zoro! Zoro, wake up!"  
  
Nami's eyes widen. "All day?"   
  
"He keeps watch. C'mon, Zoro. We gotta take Nami home."   
  
That single eye cracks open. Closes. Opens again as Zoro heaves as huge sigh and clambers to his feet. "No shoes?"  
  
Luffy shakes his head. "The old lady inside said Nami isn't spush tuh wmmmm," he mumbles around the last of the candy bar.  
  
"But you got food, I see."  
  
"Umwshsssn frr Z'ro but Nami said I could only get one."  
  
"Liar," says Zoro, apparently effortlessly translating the garble.  
  
"No, really! I'd have given you one," protests Luffy. But as Zoro's glare only intensifies, Luffy shuffles his feet and admits, "Well, I'd have given you one bite."  
  
"Greedy fuck," Zoro says without heat. He turns his attention to Nami. "So, what now?"  
  
Nami has been asking herself the same thing. If it was just a  taxi to get her home it wouldn't be so bad, but she also has to arrange to buy these two a rowboat. She turns the options over in her mind, shuffling and reshuffling the deck of possibilities, but the cards she draws are all low. Finally, she decides her gamble. If they can't go practical, then it's time to go big. "I'm pretty sure there's a place we can go to nearby that can help us out. It's expensive, so I've never been there before, but with you two and the money it should be okay."   
  
Satisfied he's gotten every last trace of chocolate, Luffy stops tonguing the wrapper and tosses it aside. "What kind of place is so expensive that even a suitcase full of money isn't enough?"  
  
"It's an exclusive restaurant run by ghouls," Nami explains. "Humans go there to eat and vampires come and feed. The ghouls look after the place and make sure no one finds out that it's a vampire feeding ground. The problem is that humans pay for entry in cash, but vampires are supposed to pay in blood. My blood is too weak to be worth anything, though, and your blood is . . . weird," she says, remembering the foul taste she had gotten in the bayou. "So I'm not sure if we'll be able to negotiate. But the ghouls have all kinds of connections since they can move around in daylight. They can probably help you buy the rowboat, and they can certainly call me a taxi."  
  
Luffy's eyes sparkle. "A restaurant! A _fancy_ restaurant! I've never eaten at one of those. What's it called?"  
  
"The Baratie."  
  
  



	3. Chapter 3

The Baratie is a three-story cake of a building in red brick frosted with wrought iron, its enormous French windows oozing light out into the darkness of the swamp. It's been served up on the rich end of Paris road, side by side with private yacht clubs and fishing lodges, and it boasts its own dock for the clientele to moor their floating egos.  
  
"Not the front door," Nami tells them. "Since Zoro's such a weirdo, we have to use the weirdo door. Through there."   
  
She points to the hedge of camellia bushes walling off the north side of the building. It's been left to grow wild, a mess pale rosettes stark against dark foliage, the row of shaggy plants crowned by the spires of the wrought iron fence it fronts.   
  
"It should be at the end down by the water," she continues, ignoring Zoro's sputtered protests.  
  
"There's a door just for weirdos? Will we see them? What are they like?" asks Luffy, stars in his eyes.  
  
"As amazing as it sounds, there actually are people who look weirder then Zoro. Mostly the Nosferatu. They're a clan of vampire who all look like their faces melted off."  
  
"That _is_ weirder than Zoro!" declares Luffy.  
  
"Stop using me as a measure for weirdness!"  
  
The door is actually a gate, a narrow thing mostly hidden by shadows, its black iron twisted into the shape of vines and leaping fish. There's a flower-bell hanging beside it, and Luffy gives its an enthusiastic yank, to which it responds with lots of silence.  
  
Luffy says, "Oh, their doorbell is broken. Let's go in and tell them." He tries the latch. "Tch, it's locked. Oi, Zoro. This gate is in our way. Cut it."  
  
"Sure." Zoro swaggers forward. His thumb pushes at the white hilt of one of his katana. Soft snickt as an inch of blade is bared.   
  
It's so ridiculous Nami doesn't even bother protesting. Does he truly believe that he's a samurai in some terrible movie? He cut the rowboat in half but it had been wood and this is-  
  
This is an iron gate that has been sliced neatly in half. It happens so quickly Nami doesn't even see it, just a vague blur of movement and then end result: the two pieces of the gate hanging limply from the hinges and the latch. Luffy carries her through them without batting an eye, Zoro trails behind them without even the grace to look proud of himself, and Nami begins to grasp for the first time just what kind of horses she's accidentally hitched her wagon to. She'd known they were strong. She's known they were strange. But this-!  
  
A pair that's wild enough to do whatever the hell comes into their heads. They've pulled the reins from her hands and carry her into the Baratie, and whatever fresh trouble might come from having broken in she'll have to face it head on and right beside them.  
  
So what is this thrill she feels in her gut as they stride across the manicured lawn of the back garden and up to the kitchen door? Why is she smiling? Why is she coiling around Luffy not to try and hold him still, but to make sure she's right there with him?  
  
Yesterday she hadn't even dared to dream of the Baratie. Weak in blood. Poor in pocket. Too busy trying to keep ahead of Arlong's demands to pause and try for something of her own.  
  
And now, here she is.  
  
It's beautiful inside. This might be a lobby intended for the Nosferatu to wait, but hideous as their faces might be, the clan is still a powerful political force. So the floor is cherry wood and the walls pristine whitewash, the antique benches upholstered in plush red velvet and the light provided by a lovely candelabra dripping crystal and burning authentic beeswax candles, the paintings are impressionist oil and the double doors leading further inside are set with frosted glass. This room is probably worth more than Nami's entire suitcase of money.   
  
It's also deserted, though Nami can just hear the faint sounds of laughter, can smell roasted fish and meat, exquisite floral perfume and spicy cologne and raw animal musk - humans are here, rich ones, and they're dinning only a few rooms away.  
  
"HELLO!" Luffy bellows. "YOUR DOORBELL IS BROKEN!"  
  
There is sudden quiet from the direction of the dinning room. Then a pattering rush of footsteps, the clatter of doorknobs, and a slender blond man in a waiter's black uniform bursts through the door.   
  
Then he sees Nami, and his face lights with a smile.  
  
"Oh my," he breaths, gliding over to take her hand in his. His shaggy blond hair hides most of his face, but up close she can see how handsome he is, how intensely blue his one visible eye.  
  
How oddly swirled his eyebrow.   
  
He says, "Won't you give me your name, fair Goddess, so I know who to address in my worship?"  
  
 _Oh_ , thinks Nami. _He's one of those. Good. This will be-_  
  
". . . This really is the weirdo door," grumbles Zoro.  
  
The blond's odd eyebrow twitches. For the first time he seems to register Luffy and Zoro's presence. "A goddess and two Nosferatu here for dinner, I see."  
  
Zoro bristles. "Who are you calling a melted-faced freak, you blond noodle?!"  
  
The waiter stares down his nose. "Sorry, we don't usually get swamp monsters so I lept to the wrong conclusion. My mistake."  
  
This time Zoro growls, a sound deep in his chest, primal and predatory. "Your _last_ mistake."  
  
He lunges for the waiter. There is a brief scuffle as Zoro tries to rip the man's arms off and gets a kick right between the eyes for his trouble. He reels back clutching his face and swearing.   
  
Luffy croons, "Oooooooh. He can bend almost as well as me!"  
  
The waiter balances delicately on one leg, the other held high in guard position. He adjusts his tie and pulls out a packet of cigarettes. "Don't think you can come in here and do whatever you want, Mosshead. The staff of the Baratie know how to keep the rabble out, even when they're musclebound thugs like you." He stuffs a cigarette in his mouth, then pats himself down for a lighter. "Now, I'm willing to forgive you since you're clearly assisting this lovely damsel, but that's only for the roughhousing. Fuck up again and I'll smear you across the walls."  
  
" _Try it_ ," hisses Zoro, and his hands wrap around a katana hilt once again. The red one this time.  
  
A chill darts down Nami's spine at the sight. This is escalating much too quickly. "You have to stop them," she tells Luffy.  
  
He doesn't even bother to glance at her. "Why? This is gonna be such a cool fight!"  
  
"Because the Baratie is Elysium! Fighting here is against the rules!"   
  
He looks at her this time, only to pout sadly and whine, "But, Nami~~~"   
  
Right. Rules mean very little to Luffy.   
  
The metallic scrap of the katana as it leaves its sheath is like a hunting cry. The waiter blows smoke through his nose and bares his teeth. Nami's brain scrabbles for something, anything to stop this.   
  
"If you fight here they won't feed us!" she blurts.  
  
Luffy sucks in a breath and his eyes are wide and scared. Zoro goes very, very still.  
  
" _Zoro!_ " Luffy's voice is a throbbing plea. His eyes are dark and watery. His lower lip wobbles.  
  
Zoro sighs. "Fucker," he grumbles, but sheaths his katana and turns away from the waiter to come and stand at Luffy's side. His glare is that of a tiger denied its prey, but his voice is all sulky teenager when he says, "You owe me a fight."  
  
"And you owe me considerably more then that," says a new voice. Deep, gravelly. For the second time a blond man comes through the glass doors, but this one is old and in the blinding white of a chef, and he stumps toward them on mismatched legs of flesh and wood. "If only for the effort of calming the clients. Speaking of, we're full up for the night, so get lost." His long mustache quivers as he scowls at the waiter. "I thought I told you to close up, Sanji."  
  
Sanji runs a hand through his hair and blows more smoke. "I thought I did. I could have sworn I locked the gate and even took the clapper out of the bell."  
  
"Oh, so that's why it was broken," says Luffy. "We came in to tell you about it."  
  
The chef snorts. "If this eggplant did his job right then how did you get past the locked gate?"  
  
"Zoro cut it!"  
  
The chef boggles at him. "Zoro . . . cut it?"  
  
"Bullshit," Sanji scoffs and goes to the door leading outside. He opens it and leans out to peer into the gloom. "That thing is two inch-thick iron lattice. I don't care how big his fancy knives are, he couldn't have-" He falls silent. Then he comes in, closes the door, and turns to the chef. "Zoro cut it. Right down the middle, like it was an apple."  
  
All eyes turn toward Zoro, who stares back at them with flat disinterest.   
  
"Zoro's so cool," says Luffy in a fond voice.  
  
That gets a reaction: a reddening of Zoro's ears, his gaze dropping and darting away from Luffy's smiling face. "Shut up."  
  
Luffy laughs at this, coming over to poke at Zoro's cheek and tease him about being shy, but the chef looks much less amused.  
  
"That gate cost me eight hundred dollars!" he barks.  
  
Luffy hums sympathetically. "Sucks that you have to replace it then, huh?"  
  
Nami tears her gaze away from the fascinating sight of Zoro squirming in embarrassment to glare at the others. "I'm not paying for it!"  
  
Luffy twists his neck to look at her again, and this time his frown is puzzled. "Well, duh. Why would you? It's not your gate."  
  
"You broke it!" snaps the chef. "That means you have to fix it!"  
  
"We only broke it because your doorbell was broken. So it's your own fault for not keeping the bell working," Luffy says in a tone that suggests that this is the most reasonable thing in the world. "And anyway, if anything is broke it's us. Even our boat is broke," he adds sadly.   
  
Nami winces. "It's true. They were living under a rowboat when I found them, and it got wrecked as they were helping me out of the bayou. They . . . really don't have any way to pay you."  
  
There is the distressing squeal of teeth being ground together and the chef turns an alarming shade of red, yanking on his mustaches and stomping his wooden leg. "If. You. Have. No money. Why. Come. Here?" he grits out.  
  
Sanji takes a long drag on his cigarette. "I have to agree with the shitty old man. This isn't a charity, you know. No money, no meal."  
  
"You mean you'll let us starve?" Luffy gasps. "But- but Sanji!"  
  
"Don't dirty my name."  
  
The biggest, fattest crocodile tears Nami's ever had the privilege to see roll down Luffy's cheeks. "But all I've had to eat is the alligator Zoro caught, and I had to share!"  
  
"You-Gaack! Ugh!" Sanji coughs, splutters, narrowly avoids swallowing his cigarette. "You fed a lady an alligator?"  
  
"Eh? Oh, no! Zoro caught her a snake."  
  
Sanji turns on Zoro with wild eyes. "You savage! Barbarian! Uncultured, swamp dwelling, _moss-monster!_ "  
  
Zoro sneers. "Kept her from starving, didn't I? Which is better then you're doing."  
  
Sanji seems to positively swell, his blond hair fluffing till it's practically on end, his blunt white teeth gnashing at his cigarette butt as the smoke coils out of his nose like the breath of a dragon. "I didn't even know she was hungry, you ass-face!"  
  
"Why else would we come to a restaurant, bastard bus-boy?"  
  
 _"I am a chef_ ," Sanji hisses, and snaps a kick into Zoro's shin. "I'm only playing waiter because we're full-up from the Red Ribbon Gumbo Festival and we needed the extra hands," he continues as he kicks savagely at Zoro's legs, a rapid fire of piston strikes that force Zoro to block with a sheathed sword or find himself with splintered tibias. "And unlike you, Mosshead, I know how to treat a lady. You, Straw-hat guy!"  
  
"I'm Luffy!"  
  
"You're a dumbass. Set the lady down on a bench while I get her something decent to eat."  
  
"And something for us, too?" Luffy asks hopefully. He settles Nami on one of the plush red velvet benches, and Zoro drops the briefcase down on the seat beside her.   
  
"Don't push your luck!" snaps Sanji. He storms out trailing smoke and curses, slams the glass doors as he leaves.  
  
The chef scowls after him. "If that kid gives me another broken door I'll use his guts for sausage casings." He shifts his glare back to Luffy and Zoro. "Which is what I'd like to do to you two idiots, but from the sounds of things you're just ignorants barely scraping by. How long have you been vampires?"  
  
Luffy and Zoro trade a look. Zoro sort of shrugs. Luffy nods, his mouth twisting, his brows furrowing. He turns to the chef. "Dunno. Maybe a year? Um, no, two years. The first one I don't remember real good, though. Zoro's pretty much the same."  
  
"Nothing but minnows. Do you even know your Sires?"  
  
Luffy and Zoro tilt their heads to the left in eerie unison, identical blank looks on their faces.   
  
"Bah. You're Caitiffs, then. It won't be worth making you pay in blood."  
  
Zoro's eye narrows, and his hand drops to the red hilted katana. "Pay in blood?"  
  
The chef waves his hand impatiently. "Not like that. I mean a donation. It's the usual fee for vampires at the Baratie."  
  
"The staff at the Baratie are all ghouls," Nami explains. "That means that they're humans who drink vampire blood. It stops them from aging and makes them stronger, and because they aren't fully vampires they can still go out into the sun without problem."  
  
"But we need to drink it regularly, the way you need to drink mortal blood, or we lose our powers and start to age again. That's where the Baratie comes in: we attract humans and arrange for vampires to feed on them, and in return vampires give us a small donation of their blood to keep us healthy. But mongrel young things like you," says the chef, sneering, "are too weak in blood to be able to pay us."  
  
Nami keeps her face impassive even as her insides churn and bile stings the back of her throat. It is not the first time she has heard Caitiffs called mongrels - she's one herself, after all- but the words rub salt into wounds still fresh.   
  
Arlong had called Bellmère a mongrel. And weak blooded, too. And then he had ruined everything.  
  
She glares down at the briefcase beside her. She has thousands of dollars in her possession but she's as destitute as Luffy and Zoro. Every dollar of this will be poured into the gaping maw of her personal demon, every cent piled up to make the most fragile of walls between those she loves and a living, breathing nightmare.   
  
For a moment she feels crushed. Her left hand grips at the briefcase's handle, a convulsive movement so charged with fear her knuckles turn bone white, and the ugly tattoo on her shoulder burns beneath the cover of her ruined t-shirt.   
  
The sound of the glass doors opening cuts through her brooding. She looks up to see Zoro scowling at her, a brooding glare made all the more menacing by how he fondles the white katana hilt, but the sight is quickly eclipsed by Sanji, who bows before her with a flourish. He's carrying a large silver tray loaded down with a trio of mismatched blue bottles.  
  
"Since you were able to endure the blood of a snake, I assumed you don't have any of the dietary restrictions of some of your kind," he says. "So this is for you." He hands her the bottle with an enormous label embellished with calligraphy and gold leaf. "Please enjoy."  
  
A bottle like this . . . "The price?"  
  
He smiles at her, a puppy's adoring grin, the smoke of his fresh cigarette wafting between them in playful curls. "I ask only for your name, Beauty."  
  
She refrains from patting his head. It's never a good idea to encourage these types. "Nami," she tells him, and unscrews the bottle top.  
  
The fragrance hits her at once. The animal meat scent of blood, yes, but there's a lightness, a- a floral scent, that calls to mind the beautiful perfumes the guests of the Baratie ware. Delicate. She takes a cautious sip.  
  
She nearly drops the bottle in shock. This is nothing like the cold dead blood of a snake! It is sweet and alive and the memory of spring mornings in a garden - of sun! Sun that isn't a terrible destroyer, but something gentle and loving. She takes another drink. Longer this time. Rolling it about her tongue and her fangs. Savouring.   
  
"This is amazing," breaths Nami. She scans the label, but past all the elaborate decorations all it says is 'Kaya.' "I had no idea you could bottle blood this way! This- It's like it's still alive somehow."  
  
Sanji practically wiggles in place at her praise. "Ah~~~ I thought you could use something refreshing after the harrowing night you've obviously had! I'm so glad it meets with your approval! And as for you two jackasses, here. Drink these."  
  
He shoves the other two bottles unceremoniously at Luffy and Zoro. These ones are plain, little better then milk bottles, but when the tops are unscrewed the smell is rich and enticing. Not delicate perfume of 'Kaya', but a meaty scent that speaks of young people in the prime of their life.  
  
Luffy downs his with burbling glee, scarlet threads dripping form the corner of his mouth. A quick swipe of his tongue clears them away, and then he moves to tonguing the bottle, straining to get ever drop and it might be funny if Nami couldn't see his tongue growing, lengthening, a long fleshy serpent that coils inside the bottle to lick it clean.  
  
"What the hell?" she whispers.  
  
That tongue rolls back into his mouth to hide behind the brilliant white fangs of his grin. "Oh. It's just something I can do. I can stretch other bits, too, see?" And then he grabs his own face and pulls and his entire head moves and keeps moving and his neck is getting longer and Nami's eyes are getting wider because he just keeps going until his neck must be four feet long, arcing across empty space to lay his chin on her shoulder and she is cheek to cheek with that winsome, cheerful, _horrible_ smile. "Neat, huh?"  
  
She warbles something in the back of her throat. Darts a glance at Zoro, who hasn't even raised an eyebrow at Luffy's antics.   
  
"Could use a cut of shōchū," he says absently, obviously more interested in his own drink, and takes another swig.  
  
"Can- Can both of you-" is all she manages to get out.  
  
"Naw. Zoro's no good at this. Well, he's stretchy in one-" A meaty THWACK interrupts him, and his head goes rocketing back toward his body.  
  
" _Get the fuck off Miss Nami, you freak!_ " hisses Sanji, leg still raised from the powerful sidekick he'd used to punt Luffy. "Fuck! You're supposed to be Caitiff! Where the hell did you learn a trick like that?"  
  
Luffy, head firmly back in place above his own shoulders, pouts magnificently. "Neh, Sa~~~nji. I'm still hungry. Can I have some of the gumbo you were talking about?"  
  
"I just fed you! And no, you can't! It's all contest entries! That means it's reserved for the judges!"  
  
"I'll be a judge!"  
  
"You'll be a smear on the wall if you don't get off me, you bottomless leech!"  
  
Zoro finishes his own bottle and sets it on the silver tray Sanji has put aside to wrestle Luffy. "Why a gumbo festival, anyway? Something special going on?"  
  
The chef, who has been watching Luffy and Sanji with the hint of a smile about his mouth, shakes himself out of his thoughts. "No," he says. "That's just how New Orleans is. It's a city of food and drink and parties. There isn't a single month that doesn't have some kind of festival going on, and usually it's three or four."  
  
Never mind that he's still wrapped around Sanji like a python; Luffy immediately turns his attention to the chef, head doing a disturbing 180 to stare, starry-eyed, at this distinguished prophet. "Did you say a party _every month?_ "  
  
"Yes," says the chef.  
  
Luffy continues, "And these parties. They're about _food?_ "  
  
"Or alcohol, yes. Most of them. And those that aren't are usually treated as an excuse to feast. We do good business from it."  
  
"Zoro," says Luffy in a trembling voice. "I've changed my mind. I don't wanna go to the Bahamas anymore. I wanna stay here." He smiles. Wide and wider, until Nami wonders if the top of his head is going to fall off, his dark eyes glittering with delight and madness. "Let's take over New Orleans."


	4. Chapter 4

Sanji is on his fourth pack of the evening, the nicotine thick in his mouth and on his tongue until he's just slightly numb, but not, tragically, in the way he'd hoped.  
  
It hadn't been so bad when it was just the contest judges. Most of them were men, all of them were over forty, and though mature women can have their charms, they barely jostle the cage of Sanji's pet monster. Flirting with them had been a pleasure, a game for two played without consequence, to be enjoyed and then forgotten.  
  
And then this crazy fucker Luffy and his pet Ginsu trooped in like a pair of Hell's own devils carrying sweet temptation: a succubus. A fallen angel. A long legged, pale skinned creature with chestnut eyes and a flow of copper hair and enormous tits that would look great squeezed around Sanji's-!  
  
He chops off the thought with the same ruthless efficiency he tops carrots. Sucks desperately on his cigarette and repeats over and over that he is a gentleman, _a gentleman, dammit_ , and not some uncouth, uncultured lug that thinks of nothing but soft breasts pushing against the confines of a ruined black t-shit, of pert butts shown off admirably by high-cut jean shorts, of the way plush lips look as they curve around words and would they look like that when wrapped around something more substantial like his co-?  
  
The acrid scent of the burning cigarette filter shakes him out of his trance. He coughs, a bit too hard, a bit too long, and god those are unfortunate words but at least he's got himself under a vague semblance of control again.  
  
One of these days he's going to manage being twenty one without making a disgrace of himself. Until then, he's just got to keep faking it as best he can.  
  
"You're taxi is here now, Miss Nami~~~" he warbles, and of course offers, "Shall I carry you out?" because that's what a gentleman does when a woman's feet are so obviously battered and it has nothing to do with his urge to cradle her close and see if her skin feels as soft as it looks, breath deep the scent of her hair.  
  
"No, Luffy will manage. Thank you, Sanji."  
  
Who knew his name could sound so sweet? If only it didn't come second to that rubbery freak's! Why the hell is this Luffy kid so lucky? He's done the bare minimum Miss Nami deserves and with a hell of a lot less panache then Sanji can obviously supply, but it's Luffy that Miss Nami lets between her thighs without a hint of self-consciousness as he hoists her into piggyback once again. _Goddamn_ some people have all the luck.  
  
At least the green-haired lug is properly relegated to hauling around baggage as nature intended. Sanji makes sure to give the fucker an extra special sneer and then shoves past him as emphatically as possible. Idiot thinks that just because he's got a pair of fangs and some pointy sticks he can wreck shit and attack the staff. Well, a vampire Zoro might be, but Sanji recognizes a moron scraped from the bottom of the barrel when he sees one, and he's going to make damn sure the moss monster stays firmly where he belongs: behind his betters.  
  
Zoro grumbles, so Sanji kicks the door shut on Zoro's face before he can step outside. Grins at the satisfying smack of wood against flesh. _Next time don't bitch about being put in your place, Swamp Monster._  
  
He lets smoke blow through his nose in a hot, satisfied plume. Outside the air is sticky, thick with bayou smells, with the sounds of water and singing insects. The waiting taxi crouches in the shadows outside the Baratie, a battered creature of flaking paint and rust stains adding its own smoke to the night as it idles, an elderly Indian man with a deep green turban is slumped at the wheel. Another bastard more interested in personal comfort than helping a wounded lady, it seems. What is the world coming to?  
  
A couple of quick, long legged strides carry Sanji ahead so he can open the taxi's passenger door. Better to get that so Luffy doesn't have to strain his three braincells juggling Nami and trying to open a door. "Your carriage, Princess Nami~~~"  
  
Alas, Luffy's obnoxious voice blots out Sanji's dulcet tones. "You'll come see us tomorrow though, neh, Nami?"  
  
"What? No! Why would I come see you tomorrow?" demands Miss Nami as she scoots herself onto the taxi's back seat.   
  
Luffy cocks his head, dark eyes utterly opaque. Impossible to read what's going on in his head because, Sanji's convinced, there's just nothing in there. "Because we're friends."  
  
" _We're not friends_ ," Miss Nami says emphatically, fire sparking in her beautiful eyes for a moment. "But I probably will come see you tomorrow. There's still some rules I have to explain to you two idiots. I don't want to catch any fallout if . . . certain people get upset with you."  
  
By which she means the local vampire Prince and his counsel, watchful guardians of the Masquerade. Sanji shivers. He would quite happily die for Miss Nami, but he's smart enough to know that dying is all he'd do for her faced against the might of the council. The slightest whim has seen full-blooded vampires snuffed out like candles. A lone ghoul is not even worth a burnt match before that kind of power.  
  
Still, there are things within his power that he can do to protect Miss Nami. With that in mind, he comes to stand beside the driver's window and knocks imperiously on the glass. The diver eyes him. Sanji can smell him: tough old meat and soured blood and animal weariness. Sanji smiles encouragingly.  
  
Sanji's charm never fails, especially when bolstered by a crisp new twenty dollar bill. The driver rolls down the window.  
  
"Make sure the lovely lady gets home safely," Sanji tells him, slipping him the money.  
  
"Yes, of cou-"  
  
"Because I've memorized your license and cab number," continues Sanji, casually studying the burning end of his cigarette, feeling his own internal fires slowly building. Power runs thinner in the blood of ghouls but it's there just the same, and Sanji's a hell of a lot older then this twenty-something body wants people to believe. He reaches deep within and loosens shackles on the monster inside himself. Lets it speak through his voice in a guttural threat: "If Miss Nami doesn't get home, I'll come looking for you, Mr Prasad. And you won't like that."   
  
And then he looks up and pins the mortal with a glare, letting him see the fires that burn hot inside Sanji, letting him see the ravenous hunger of something no longer truly human that's just waiting for an excuse, any excuse, to slip the leash and _feed_.   
  
The old man's fingers tighten on the steering wheel. The edges of his turban grow damp with sweat. But his voice and gaze are steady and his mustache doesn't even quiver when he says firmly, "Nothing. Will happen to the young miss."  
  
Sanji grins appreciatively. "A real veteran cabby, hmm? Well, good. I'll leave Miss Nami in your care, then!"    
  
He saunters back around to where Nami is now taking her suitcase from the moss monster, setting it down on the seat beside her and patting it affectionately like it's a big rectangular dog. Cute! "Is there anything else I can do for you before you go, sweet Miss Nami?"  
  
She purses her lips, a little cupid bow that looks perfect for kissing, for licking teasingly until she opens her mouth and what would she taste like? The sweet blood of Kaya? Or her own, more subtle flavour?  
  
"Actually . . . "  
  
His heart skips a beat. She wants something. From him! More food? An errand? A massage? _Cunnilingus?_  
  
"There's something I need you to buy for tomorrow. If you wouldn't mind?"  
  
She wants him to go shopping for her! Sweet intimacy reserved for family and lovers. He swoons a little, catches himself on the dented roof of the taxi before he can disgrace himself and collapse in front of his goddess. "Of course, Miss Nami! It would be a pleasure! What do you need?"  
  
He's a little surprised at the request she makes, but also rather thrilled. Though innocent enough, it has all kinds of naughty implications that make his collar feel tight. Is she trying to hint at something with this request? Trying to show him what kind of woman she is? It sure as hell seems so if the delightfully coy way she drops her gaze and leans into his personal space is any indication, and warm shivers run up and down his spine to have her so near. Her lashes are like butterfly wings, great colourful sweeps that flutter and dip. The scent of citrus soap still lingers despite her time in the bayou. This close he can see her skin is flawless alabaster as only a vampire's can be, can see the gold highlights in her coppery hair.  
  
"I realize it's an odd request but I'm really going to need it," she murmurs. "I can count on you, right? Even if . . . " She hesitates. Bites her lip, the little minx. She should let Sanji do that for her. "Even if I might not be able to pay?"  
  
"Of course, Miss Nami. It's all part of the service." He'll just put it on Luffy's tab.   
  
The smile he gets is a glorious sunrise, the gentle pat on his cheek a tropical caress. "Thank you, Sanji! You're the best!"  
  
 _I'M THE BEST~~~~!_  
  
Some might say that it's car exhaust and cigarette smoke in the air around him as the taxi drives off, but Sanji knows it's Cloud Nine. He sighs happily and twirls in place, blowing little smoke hearts to himself, which are promptly sliced in half - a katana blade swinging too fast for the eyes to follow, with only the rush of air and the sight of Sanji's heartbreaks to show that Zoro has once again thrust himself into Sanji's reality.  
  
"Knock it off before you jizz your pants," Zoro snarls.  
  
"Fuck off, Mosshead, we don't all suffer from your inadequacies," Sanji fires back, but before they can really get going Luffy speaks up.  
  
"What did the peg leg guy mean by being our pattern?"  
  
Sanji turns back toward the Baratie. "The old man's name is Zeff, not 'peg leg guy.' Call him that and people'll get confused - he only wears the peg at the restaurant to impress the customers. The rest of the time he's got a normal prosthetic."   
  
Luffy wilts, his eyes dewy with tears for broken dreams. "Wha~~t? He's a _fake?_ "  
  
" _He's not a fake_ ," Sanji snarls, bristling. "He really- he really is missing his leg! He's just not some pirate from a goddamn fairy tale, okay? And he's agreed to be your _patron_ , so show some fucking gratitude!"  
  
Zoro puts up a fuss, of course. Sanji is quickly coming to the conclusion that Zoro is why the world can't have nice things. "We're not obedient dogs like you are. Don't expect us to wag our tails at someone trying to collar us, shitty pervert. Luffy," Zoro's voice goes hard and flat. "Don't let the fucker fast talk you, or we'll wind up with this Zeff as our boss for the rest of our lives."  
  
Luffy stops dead at that, a frown creasing his face, and there's something menacing about it. Something dangerous.   
  
He'd pulled his own head four feet from his body, Sanji suddenly remembers. Yanked it into a long, writhing snake that laughed and spoke and how the hell could Sanji have just forgotten that? Set it aside like eye colour or left handedness. This thing standing before him in sandals and a straw hat is no more human then the gators out in the swamp, and if it smiles and laughs and pouts like a child it's nothing but a hunter's camouflage, and Sanji'd best remember it.  
  
Luffy's voice, when it comes, is mild. Gentle. "Sanji. This pattern thing. Zeff isn't going to try and boss us around, is he?" His gaze seems to bore into Sanji's.   
  
It's like Sanji's mouth moves on autopilot when he answers, "No. The old man's a nagging bitch sometimes, but he really just wants to make sure you don't get killed. He's got a soft spot for dumb kids out of their depth."  
  
"Okay," says Luffy. And, "Good. Thanks, Sanji." And then he smiles, wide and sweet and pleased.  
  
Miss Nami's smile had been a sunrise, an achingly beautiful sight that lifts the heart and humbles the soul.  
  
Luffy's smile is a nova. It is brilliant and blinding and it wipes everything else from Sanji's mind for a single, heart-stopping, breath-stealing moment. It is terrible and terrifying, and Sanji reels backwards in half-stunned shock.   
  
_What-? What the hell is this kid? Fuck! I've gotta ditch him before it's too late and he ropes me into something I'll regret._  
  
"It's too late," says Zoro. Then, before Sanji can turn on him for reading minds without permission, Zoro asks Luffy, "So we're letting the old man patron us?"  
  
"Yup! Sanji says it's okay and Sanji's a good guy. I trust him."  
  
"'Kay." This is apparently all that Zoro needs to hear, immediately losing his tense guard and returning to slouching apathy, and what was that about obedient dogs?  
  
"I thought you wouldn't wag your tail," Sanji goads him. "But I guess if this rubber idiot says 'sit' and 'stay', you'll do it. You roll over for him in bed, too?" He makes sure to add some nice, explicit hand gestures.  
  
The sudden look of shock tells him that barb went home, but before Sanji can say anything more Luffy butts in with a cheerful, "Yeah! And it's really great because Zoro's an amazing fuck. You know how you have to be super gentle with people because they're so fragile and that can be lots of fun but sometimes you just wanna do whatever? Zoro's great for that! He can take anything!"  
  
Ears and cheeks flaming scarlet in brilliant contrast to his green hair, Zoro buries his face in his hands. Sanji would actually feel sorry for him except he's too busy feeling sorry for himself, battered by a sudden flood of mental images of what these two freaks likely get up to. "I didn't really want to know the answer to that."  
  
" _Then don't ask!_ " Zoro howls as he tears his katana from its crimson sheath and slashes viciously at Sanji. "How the _fuck_ have you not realized that this idiot has no brain-to-mouth filter?!"  
  
"Maybe he wants to fuck you, too, Zoro," Luffy offers helpfully. Dodges through the ruined gate toward the restaurant, laughing, as the next swing of the katana whistles at him. A giggling monkey playing tag with a snarling tiger.  
  
"Not everyone is like you and willing to stick their dick in anything that holds still long enough!" hisses Zoro, storming after him.  
  
Sanji follows behind, and this time keeps his teeth locked firmly closed on the question that immediately leaps to mind, which is why the fuck is a vampire even sticking his dick in anything? It's not that they can't, it's just that every vampire Sanji has ever known has felt that sex is a messy, ugly, inferior experience to sinking their fangs into someone.  
  
Then again, considering Luffy, maybe that's exactly why he likes it. The raw animal carnality of a woman's body spread out and welcoming, breasts heaving and she gasps for air and slick warmth between her clenching legs, her hair sticking to her neck with sweat as she bites her lip just as Miss Nami had and oh, oh that's a nice picture. Sanji has to brace himself against the door jamb - he knows what Miss Nami smells like but what about in the heat of passion? That sweet musk of a woman's arousal.   
  
"You're really turned on," says Luffy, suddenly draping himself across Sanji's shoulders. "You want me to hold Zoro still for you?"  
  
Two voices snarl as one in an emphatic, " _No!_ "  
  
Luffy sighs dramatically and slinks off of Sanji. "Boring."  
  
"I can't wait to ditch you assholes," Sanji grumbles. "Stay outside while I got tell Zeff we're leaving."  
  
That makes Luffy perk up again. "Sanji's taking us someplace?"   
  
"Which you would already know if you'd been paying attention. Since you two have decided to stay in the city instead of getting a boat, Nami and the old man arranged for a place for the pair of you to live."  
  
"Ah? Where's that?"  
  
Sanji smiles grimly. "Don't worry. It's perfect for you."


	5. Chapter 5

The choice before Sanji is a crucial one. Miss Nami has put her faith in him and his judgment - to fail her now when her trust is barely budding, a shy flower not yet come into its own, would be unforgivable.  
  
But how to make sure his choice is the right one? He crosses his arms, drums his fingers on his biceps. If only he'd seen her bra through the tears in her t-shirt. A plain sports bra? Animal print? White lace or black? You can learn so much about a woman from her choice of undergarments.  
  
Like her cup size. He sighs happily, trying to estimate the heft of those luscious breasts. Is she a D cup? A double D? Dare he even hope, an E?  
  
"Sir, we'll be closing in ten minutes."  
  
Then there's the nature of this purchase: a yoga mat. Now that's food for thought he can really sink his mental teeth into. The idea of Miss Nami's body twisting and stretching, her graceful arms coiling about her, her thighs straining to hold position. Would she wear her hair down, to let it fall about her face in sweet curls, or tie it up in a messy bun, a few strands escaping to wisp about her face?   
  
"We're closing in five minutes."  
  
Up, Sanji decides. Miss Nami definitely has that practical feel to her. And she wanted a big mat, so it must be one of the faster, more sporty styles of yoga. Lots of moving, quick changes of position to make her tits bounce. Oh god, what if it's hot yoga? That's a thing now, right? Intense heat that would make beads of sweat trickle down along her curves. Little trails of salt and water begging to be traced with a tongue.  
  
"We are _closing_ ," snaps the weedy teenage clerk, his pimply red face filling Sanji's vision. "Please. Leave."  
  
"Don't rush your customer," Sanji shoots back.   
  
"You've been in here over an hour! _Sir!_ "  
  
Sanji looms over the teen. "Listen, kid. There are times in life when a man can't afford to rush no matter what the pressure, when he's got to stand firm and consider all the options before making his choice or he'll regret it for the rest of his life! Times when a woman's happiness is at stake!"  
  
The teenager closes his eyes. "My mom will be really happy if I get home on time."  
  
"Your mom is a saint and an angel," Sanji tells him. "But so's the lady who's sent me on this quest and I'm not about to fail her. Gimme that one." He points at one of the wider mats, a charming number in green printed with white lotuses, with a carrier bag to match.  
  
The kid mumbles something that sounds suspiciously like, "Anything to get you out of here," in a sullen tone that's all too reminiscent of that fucking green-haired asshole.   
  
It makes Sanji's eyebrows twitch. He has managed, for the short time he's been in the yoga supply shop, to forget about his two new irritating charges. But now that he's finished shopping for Miss Nami he's back in the sad reality of his new situation.  
  
Zeff has decided that since Sanji 'gets along so well' with the new fledglings, he's now in charge of looking after them. Oh, he's called Sanji a 'liaison' and made lots of noise about how Sanji's just supposed to pass on the occasional requests of an errand on behalf of the Baratie, but he's also made sure to talk about how terribly the restaurant's reputation would suffer if these new proteges made a spectacle of themselves, how sad it was that these two Caitiffs had been reduced to eating alligators. Have they even been taught how to feed on humans? Modern vampires are so lax about their responsibilities to their creations.  
  
That last bit cuts particularly close to the bone.   
  
And so Sanji has grudgingly accepted his role as Speaker to Idiots and Keeper of Wild Morons. With that in mind, he lays his purchase in the backseat of his little sports car, then takes a moment to sit behind the wheel and smoke. The nicotine soothes his irritation at the situation enough that he can plan rationally.   
  
Finally, he starts up the car and heads out. He's got a couple other errands to run.  
  
~  
  
Sanji arrives at the St Rumbar cemetery a little after six thirty. Even though there's still light he's keeping a cautious eye out - the Desire neighbourhood is a nasty place, with entire streets of abandoned houses left to rot. It's an ideal breeding ground for vermin both animal and human, and with that in mind he makes sure his little paper charm hangs prominently in the car window. The thing had cost him six month's salary, but the Tremere mage who'd sold it to him had guaranteed it would protect against any kind of theft or vandalism, and four years later and countless trips to the worst of neighbourhoods has proved its worth.   
  
The cemetery itself is in even worse disrepair than the deserted houses around it. Officially, it's associated with a local church, but the truth is the place has remained utterly untouched for decades. There's still cobblestone and shitty gravel instead of cement over most of the pathways, for example, and the tombs are all ancient monsters of rotting brick, weatherbeaten and falling in on themselves.   
  
The reason makes itself felt with a cold gush of wind as soon as Sanji unlocks the gate: the St Rumbar cemetery is haunted as fuck.  
  
And not the fun 'bring the tourists' haunted, either. In fact, the locals go out of their way to keep people out of the place, with an iron gate and padlock guarding the entry and broken glass cemented to the tops of the surrounding walls. Because it's not something as intriguing as spooks and madness and death that await you inside.   
  
It's disease.  
  
A terrible, virulent form of influenza that has infected every single mortal stupid enough to step inside and inflicts a nearly eighty percent fatality rate, the few survivors left with lungs ruined for life and hands that tremble, half-numb. It is not, however, contagious, which means it's not the sort of plague vector that demands attention. And with the location being where it is and the price of redevelopment being what it is, the city has instead chosen to wall it off and pretend it doesn't exist.  
  
The combination of abandonment and shelter from mortals should have made this little cemetery a perfect home for such luckless deformed freaks as the Nosferatu, who are always looking for new places to hide, except for the other aspect of the haunting.  
  
" _Going to deliver Binks' saké! Following the sea breeze! Riding on the waves_ ," croons a soft voice.  
  
Twenty-four hour nonstop singing.  
  
" _Far across the salty depths! The merry evening sun!_ "  
  
It's quite faint. Most humans can't even hear it. But vampires and ghouls, more in tune with the realm of the dead, are unfortunate enough to be able to hear it clearly. Worse, because it's a haunting and not actual music, it can't be drowned out with other music or blocked with earplugs, and after about a week of listening to the same song even the most determined of souls vacates.   
  
Sanji spares a blissful moment to savour the thought of the two morons stewing in musical misery. Maybe he'll go find that church and light a candle to Saint Rumbar.   
  
Since no one is able to stay here over a few weeks, St Rumbar's has become a kind of half-way house for new vampires in the city. There's a tomb in a discreet back corner, far from the front gate, sheltered by a rusting iron fence of its own and shaded by a massive oak tree. The tomb itself was long ago emptied by some enterprising Nosferatu still ignorant of St Rumbar's curse, and various temporary tenants have added things like a makeshift bunk bed and a trio of metal lockers stolen from one of the local abandoned schools. It's not much, but it's better then the boat Luffy and Zoro had apparently been bunking under.  
  
It does, however, lack certain necessities. Sanji makes his way down the path at a casual stroll, kicking at weeds and stray bricks fallen from the tombs, whistling in time to the song, swinging the plastic bags of supplies he'd bought. If those two are going to be associated with the Baratie then they can't keep acting -and smelling- like unwashed savages.  
  
He kicks open the iron gate to the tomb with a flourish and stops dead, bags dropping from hands gone limp with shock at the sight of Zoro standing in the shadows of the doorway with his katana drawn.  
  
"You're awake," Sanji says, dumbfounded.  
  
"No shit," says Zoro in a tone that suggests that being up and about during daylight is the most natural thing in the world for a vampire.  
  
"Why- How-" are you awake?! Sanji wants to demand, but can't do more then stammer the beginnings of his thoughts.  
  
"Bring the stuff inside. 'S too bright out, even with the tree shade."  
  
No surprise over Sanji showing up with gifts, not even a 'thank you' for his generosity, just a demand for service with the same matter of fact arrogance that Zoro seems to have toward everything. Sanji grinds his teeth and makes elaborate faces at that broad, naked back.  
  
 _I hope you get Binks' saké stuck in your head for the rest of your unlife, you asshole! I hope you're humming it when they stake you out in the sun!_  
  
He stomps into the crypt after Zoro. Inside there's barely enough room to maneuver, the battered metal frame of the bunk bead taking up most of the small brick room. Zoro sheaths his katana and props it in the corner with its partner, cracks his neck. Luffy is on the top bunk, comatose like a proper vampire at this time of day, sprawled across the mildewed mattress with his arms and legs dangling down and down and down over the edge, more than four feet of extra length to let his hands and feet puddle on the floor. It makes Sanji's stomach churn to see it, but Zoro just brushes one long tentacle-arm aside and sits down on the bottom bunk, oblivious to dust and grime and spiders.  
  
"This place reeks of mold and dead rats," Sanji says, rummaging around in his plastic bags. "And even if that suits you guys, you'll carry the stink with you into the Baratie. Here. Since you like to cut stuff you can open these, shitty Mosshead." He tosses a package of air fresheners at Zoro.  
  
"I'm surprised you can smell anything past the stench of your own perfume, shit cook," says Zoro. He rips open the plastic packaging, wrinkles his nose as the powerful scent of mint gushes out.   
  
"It's cologne, you uncivilized brute, and it's applied with skill and discretion, so fuck you. Hang those on the bed frame. Best to keep 'em close to the source for maximum impact. And here." He tosses a box of detergent at Zoro's face and is mildly disappointed that Zoro makes the catch. "There's a 24hour laundromat three blocks from here where you'll be able to wash those rags you call clothing. In the meantime you can wear this." The next thing he throws is one of the remaining plastic bags, stuffed full of the cheapest pharmacy clothing he could find.  
  
Zoro rustles around inside and pulls out one of the black tank tops. He immediately starts to pull it on, but is stopped when Sanji snaps, "No, don't yank it on over your dirty ass. As soon as the sun sets I'm taking the pair of you to the YMCA for showers; you can change then."  
  
"You're organized," says Zoro, putting the clothing back in the bag.  
  
Sanji sneers at him. "You think you're the first fledglings I've had to nursemaid? The only thing different about you two is that the others knew how to say thanks."  
  
The hint goes in one ear and out the other as Zoro returns to rooting around in the plastic bag. Self-absorbed fucker doesn't bother asking any of the obvious questions, either. Not 'how many have there been' (about a dozen) or 'how long have you been doing this' (seventeen years, give or take) and instead says, "I thought you said you were a chef, not a babysitter."  
  
Having said the same thing to Zeff, Sanji adds 'plagiarist' to the long list of Zoro's many sins. "Maybe I want to give back to my community."  
  
"That's nice of you."  
  
Patronizing ass. Must be nice to be so carefree and not bound since childhood to a species of immortal parasites, groomed to be servant and pet, lover and worshiper all in one. Sanji ran halfway across the globe to slip his leash, but in the end even working for the Baratie isn't freedom, just the chance to chose his own masters.  
  
That's the other face of Zeff's patronage. All ghouls know that their survival depends at the sufferance of the vampires. Best to ingratiate yourself early when and where you can.   
  
Sanji, of course, prefers to snuggle up only to the ladies, and Zeff is usually indulgent, but this time he's stayed firm. Something about Luffy and Zoro has him all but flinging Sanji bodily into their arms. Sanji'd have suspected some of the more insidious vampire mind control powers at work except that he'd been there and he knows the signs and there'd been nothing, nothing at all except Luffy being a clinging, whining, begging little monster. And Zoro? Ha! The thought of such a dumb brute being able to command any powers more subtle then a can opener is ludicrous.  
  
Sanji's stare has finally drilled down into that thick skull enough for Zoro to notice. He looks up. Frowns. "What?"  
  
"Just trying to imagine what kind of moron would Embrace you. Right now I'm guessing Brujah or Malkavian. Only a thug or a madman would consider you vampire material."  
  
Zoro raises an eyebrow. "Don't know anyone by those names."  
  
"They're not people, dumbass. They're clans. Families of vampires."  
  
"Like those melty-faced Nosferatu Nami was talking about."  
  
"Oooooh! You actually remember! And here I thought the moss on your head had eaten through your brain."  
  
"The milk go sour on you this morning, shit cook? You've been a pissy bitch since you got here."  
  
"Maybe it's because some sour-faced jackass can't be bothered to grunt a thank you for my consideration!"  
  
"No one asked you to do anything," snaps Zoro with the same backwards logic Luffy favours.  
  
"Then give me my shit back so I can find someone who'll appreciate it," Sanji snarls, and lunges for the plastic bag. Zoro twists aside, dodging and getting Sanji solidly in the face with an elbow and Sanji swears and bites his cigarette in half and fuck if his nose is broken he's going to turn this weed-head into fertilizer.  
  
They thrash on the lower bunk, Zoro punching, Sanji kicking, both of them biting and swearing and cursing and knocking heads, and the bunk bed shakes so hard Luffy slides off the side to flop bonelessly on the floor. Zoro doesn't even bother to spare him a glance but Sanji darts a look sideways and Zoro promptly knees Sanji up between the legs with titanic force.  
  
Sanji crumples, curling inward, clutching himself. Gasps out between sobbing breaths, "You fuckin' . . . Shame of a man. In . . . In the goddamn _balls?_ Really?"  
  
Zoro just shrugs, unashamed. "Don't look away in a fight."  
  
"He fell," gasp, wheeze, "off the bed! You . . . I thought you two were fucking!"  
  
No living blood, no soul of their own - a vampire shouldn't be able to blush, but Zoro breaks that rule, too, face and neck and ears flaming scarlet, his earrings jingling madly as he jerks away from Sanji as if slapped. "Wha- what's that got to do with it?"   
  
"Don't you care if he's hurt?!"  
  
And Zoro answers, "I'd know if he was." Flat certainty, as if he's talking about his arm or his leg and not a whole separate person. The blush vanishes like a blown out candle. The scarred face is serious, the one-eyed gaze growing watchful, savage.   
  
The agony between Sanji's legs fades and is replaced by chill unease in his stomach. That's not the look of a friend or a lover.   
  
It's the look of a ghoul.  
  
Dumbass fledglings with no idea of the trouble they can get themselves into, who put anything they can catch into their mouths, who fuck and who probably bite and oh, god, what if this poor bastard-?  
  
"Oi, Mosshead. Zoro." Sanji swallows thickly. He doesn't like this guy and he can't see Luffy having done it knowingly, but no one deserves the kind of leash a vampire can hitch to you so he asks, "You and Luffy. You never . . . You never drank his blood, did you?"  
  
Zoro eyes him wearily. "This about the diablerie bullshit?"  
  
"What? No! That's only if you kill a vampire by drinking all their blood. This is about making sure you aren't-"  
  
A pair of hands suddenly dart up over the edge of the bed and clamp onto Zoro's shoulders, elongated arms wiggling like serpents before they tense and yank and Zoro is flat on his back. Luffy's head pops up and grins at Sanji. "So you did wanna fuck Zoro! You even got him on the bed, wow! Neh, Sanji, if I help you'll let me watch, right?"  
  
Zoro punches Luffy in the nose with enough force to rocket Luffy's head into the far wall of the crypt, rubbery neck stretching, impact the satisfying wet crack of a melon being split. " _What is it with you and having people fuck me_ ," Zoro roars.  
  
Luffy gives him a sunshine smile. "'cuz I like how happy Zoro looks with a cock up his ass."  
  
Incoherent bellowing follows along with something Sanji is pretty sure is Japanese but is kind of hard to make out past the froth of spit and blood boiling out of Zoro's mouth as he wraps his hands around Luffy's stretched out throat and wrings it like a wet towel.   
  
The two of them get into it on the floor and Sanji scoots to the edge of the bed, reaching out a cautious foot to nudge the plastic bags out of range.   
  
Watching them like this, with Zoro doing his best to tie Luffy's neck in a knot and Luffy coiling around him like a python, lengths of arms and legs double looping to keep Zoro still for Luffy to grope, Sanji feels the cold chill melt around the edges. Whatever has given Zoro the eyes of a man blood bound and slave souled, it doesn't seem to keep him from giving as good as he gets in a spat, and that alone says some pretty significant stuff.  
  
Maybe it's a mutual thing? It happens sometimes. Vampires get lonely and want to bind themselves together. Fledglings try something kinky and wind up with a tie more intimate then they could have imagined.   
  
Sanji pulls out a fresh cigarette. A flick of his lighter signals a waft of soothing nicotine into his system, the warmth of the smoke and the mellow taste of tobacco coiling around the taste of satisfaction and easing the last of the cold ache inside of him. Master and slave? He ducks a little as one of Zoro's boots get flung through the air. More like dumb teens who got married early.   
  
_Makes you see them in a whole new light_ , he thinks, then grimaces. At this point he's seeing entirely too much of either of them in any kind of light. A thrashing heave of washboard abs and rippling shoulders has let Zoro wrestle his arms free of Luffy's grasp only to have his pants yanked down the rest of the way to tangle uselessly around his remaining boot, making it abundantly clear that he doesn't bother with any clothing but the basics.  
  
"Seriously, Mosshead? You couldn't even be bothered to pick up a package of tighty whities?"  
  
"Quit ogling people's junk, shitty pervert!"  
  
"Like I have a choice with you waving it around. C'mon, there's just enough time before sunset for me to make another clothing run and  it's on me, so what do you want? Boxers? Briefs?"  
  
" _PANTIES!_ " cries a ghostly voice.  
  
You could light a sky with the stars in Luffy's eyes. "Zoro would look _great_ in panties!"  
  
Sanji doesn't even flinch at the mental image, too busy trying to keep his eyes from popping out of his head. _Fucking ghost can do something other than sing?!_ He takes a drag on his cigarette. Freezes. _Fucking ghost is a pervert?!_   
  
His mind flashes back to the fledglings he'd brought here for temporary shelter. Sweet Monica and pretty Amber and Bethany with her slender fingers and- "I LET LADIES STAY HERE!" he bellows.  
  
" _Yo ho ho ho ho ho~_ "   
  
Zoro punches Luffy in the kidneys, finally getting in a hit with enough force to stun him and make his coiling limbs loosen, and Zoro is quick to squirm free. "Idiot. Ghosts are always trouble. Why didn't you get the damn thing exorcised?"  
  
"Because it costs a shit ton of money and we didn't think it did anything but sing," Sanji snaps. "As far as anyone knew the only people the ghost hurt were mortals, so-" He stops, boggling at his first full frontal sight of Zoro in the nude. He's dimly aware that his cigarette has fallen from his lips and that his mouth is hanging open but fuck that because, " .  .  . Your carpet matches the drapes."  
  
Zoro frowns. "What?"  
  
"Your pubes, you naked ape! They're green! Why the fuck are they green? _Why did you dye them green?!_ "  
  
"Oh, that." Zoro looks down at himself. Scratches his head, making his earrings jingle. "I didn't. They're just like that."  
  
"His eyelashes are green too. You just don't notice 'cuz it's a really dark colour," Luffy supplies helpfully.  
  
Sanji buries his face in his hands. "Is nothing normal about you?"  
  
"Nope," says Luffy. "Zoro's weird. That's why Nami had us take the weirdo door!"  
  
"I'm sure you're half the reason Miss Nami used it," Sanji snaps, but there isn't the bite there should be to the words because his brain is scrambling. Hadn't Luffy and Zoro told Zeff that neither of them remember the first year of their creation? And that stretching ability. He'd thought Luffy had just picked up an odd knack -vampires do that sometimes, especially Caitiffs who's muddy blood can generate some surprising throwbacks- but hair growing green needs more esoteric intervention, and there's only one sect of vampires Sanji knows of capable of such things.   
  
He rubs one of his eyebrows self-consciously. Green hair seems a petty a modification for one of that clan to have inflicted on a test subject, but then again, Zoro was awake during the day . . . And who knows what might be lurking under his skin? _Maybe it's a good thing they don't remember that first year._  
  
Luffy clambers to his feet and starts fumbling at the button of his shorts. "Neh, Sanji, wanna see my dick, too? It stretches!"  
  
"No I fucking do not! No one wants to see that!" He sends Zoro's lost boot rocketing off that rubbery skull.   
  
"Zoro likes it," Luffy counters, lip thrust out in a childish pout.  
  
"Pervert ghost might like it, too," grumbles Zoro, finally pulling his pants back on. "Oi, Luffy, gimme my boot."  
  
The boot is obediently handed over. "You really think the ghost might like it?" At Zoro's shrug Luffy cups his hands around his mouth. Yells, "Ghost! Pervert ghost! D'you like dicks, too, or only panties?!"  
  
" _Waves of gold and silver dissolve to salty spray, as we all set sail to the ends of the sea~_ "  
  
Luffy sighs. "Singing again. I guess he doesn't like dicks."  
  
"He might just have lost focus," says Zoro. He's started putting the new clothing away. Jean shorts and black sweatpants and a rainbow of cheap tank tops, folded neatly and stacked in one of the lockers. "Ghosts have a hard time paying attention to the Middle World. Try his name."  
  
"We don't know his name," Sanji says when Luffy turns an expectant gaze toward him. "Don't know anything about him, really, except that he's been here since the nineteen twenties. We think he was a Spanish Flu victim since any living human who walks in here is cursed to die of some sort of magic flu within forty eight hours." He cocks his head at Zoro, who is now putting away the laundry detergent and the extra air fresheners. "Shit, if I'd known someone managed to domesticate you I'd have brought dog treats. You okay with just a pat on the head or do I have to scratch your ears, too?"  
  
Zoro doesn't even bother glancing at him. "Go back to your kitchen and bake pies, shit cook."  
  
Luffy comes over to the lockers and starts taking out the tank tops Zoro has just folded and put away, examining them one by one before dropping them to the ground. "How many people are gonna live here?"   
  
"What? Oh. No, you dumbass," says Sanji. "Those are all for you."  
  
"Eh?! Really?" Luffy beams at Zoro. "I get more then one shirt!"  
  
Zoro grins back. "Yeah. He bought me some extra pants, too."  
  
"Wow! Sanji's so nice!"  
  
"Too bad he didn't buy any booze."  
  
"Or food."  
  
Two heads turn as one to show Sanji identical expressions of crushing disappointment.   
  
He says, "I hate you both."  
  
Five minutes later he's in his car, pulling away from the curb and swearing to himself.   
  
_Why the fuck am I doing a beer and pretzel run for vampires?_


	6. Chapter 6

The YMCA is one of those places that don't seem like a good vampire resource on the surface but is actually dead useful for the undead, especially the itinerant, the migratory, and the ones desiring to live mostly off the grid. You get a ghoul manning the front desk and have them fudge all the registration information, and once you have a card you gain access to both showers and breakfast, the Y being an excellent place for vampires to casually pick up new 'friends.' Less atmospheric than a goth club or dive bar, maybe, but it's always best to vary the hunting grounds.  
  
Now, showered, changed, and with newly printed IDs in their pockets, the gruesome twosome sits dripping in the backseat of Sanji's car. Zoro's katana lay propped against his shoulder. Luffy's straw hat is jammed down over wet hair. Sanji hadn't bothered getting two separate sets of tank tops, and the result is that Luffy's wiry frame swims in an expanse of blue fabric and Zoro's black number clings to the swell of his muscles like it's painted on.  
  
"You smell like mint," Luffy tells Zoro. His face is a caricature in the dark of the night, lines drawn exaggerated by the flashing streetlights they drive pass. "Is Zoro starting to grow leaves?"  
  
"Depends. Do you want your face to start growing holes?" The words are vicious but the tone of voice is warm, even fond, and Sanji takes a glance at Zoro's slouching silhouette in the rear view mirror, the way he has an arm curled around Luffy's shoulders, and can come to only one conclusion.  
  
"You two fucked in the Y's showers? Isn't that a bit cliché?"  
  
Zoro shrugs. "Did you really want to take him to see Nami when he was riled up and horny?"  
  
There is a shriek and squeal of tortured rubber, the car suddenly careening toward the sidewalk as Sanji has a teeth grinding seizure at the though of wiggly pervert meat snake Luffy getting his tentacles all over Miss Nami. They hit the curb hard and bounce, Sanji having to wrench the wheel and slam the breaks to keep from ploughing right into a telephone poll, and thank god they were driving down a side street with no one following because this is enough of a mess already, his lovely little car with its undercarriage scraped to hell and a pair of sexual deviants splattered across the passenger rear windows.   
  
"What the fuck is wrong with you?!" Zoro snaps, peeling himself off the glass.   
  
Sanji takes grim satisfaction in having ruined the Swamp Thing's self satisfied afterglow. "The only thing wrong here is your face," he says with false sweetness. Waves a raised middle finger to counter any retort and glances into the mirrors to make sure he isn't trailing oil or break fluid.  
  
Kicks hammer at the back of Sanji's seat. "Do you even have a license, Eyebrow?" Zoro demands.  
  
"What'd you call me, Mossface?"  
  
And then Luffy discovers the power windows, his soft hissing laugh curling about the car as he makes his window surge up and down, amusing himself by squishing his arm and making his elbow bend the wrong way.  
  
Sanji groans. "Oh, for fuck's sake. Luffy, knock it off!"  
  
"Wait! I wanna try something." He thrusts his straw hat into Zoro's hands and then sticks his head out the window, cheeks immediately puffing out to flap in the slipstream. His laughter turns to bubbling giggles, joined by Zoro's soft chuckles, half muffled in the palm of a hand.  
  
"Can you do the tongue thing that dogs do?" Zoro asks.  
  
"Can you not do this in the goddamn city where anyone could see?" Sanji counters. "You'd think you'd never ridden in a car before!"  
  
Luffy pulls his head in to answer, "That's 'cuz I haven't."  
  
Sanji's fingers grip the steering wheel tight, his gaze darts across the dark alleys to the side, the shadows and flashes of neon colour, the posted speed limit, the endless dark windows of the surrounding buildings like open, hungry mouths. Anything to keep him from reacting.   
  
It's always a tightrope walk when talking to a vampire about the past. Even the young ones. They are monsters, born from a monstrous act, and it's a rare one indeed that hasn't been damaged in some way. Wounded in heart, in mind, in soul. And you can never tell how they'll react to having those scabs picked at.   
  
He's only seen someone's intestines spool out like sausage links once so far in his life but that was more than enough of a lesson in how to keep his mouth shut.   
  
And yet . . . And yet . . . He glances at the rear view mirror. At Luffy's face, once more framed by that battered straw hat. At Zoro's apathetic scowl. And yet he can't help picking at this. "You just really like public transport?"   
  
"Naw. We were too poor for that," Luffy answers. "We had a bike, though! Ace stole it and we'd share."  
  
One question follows another. "Ace?"  
  
"My big brother. What about you, Zoro? Did you get to ride in cars?"  
  
Zoro is quiet for a moment. ". . . Don't remember," he says slowly. "I think so? I knew how to manage my swords getting in and out."  
  
"Why am I not surprised that you can only remember things in relation to your sharp sticks?" Sanji jeers.  
  
"Because I'm obviously sensible enough not to fill my head with useless crap."  
  
"What are you implying?!"  
  
"Nothing. Why? Feeling insecure about what's between your ears?"  
  
"Better than insecure about what's between my legs. _Two_ swords? Really?"  
  
That gets him one of Zoro's deep growls, and the sound that rumbles in the air and Sanji's chest, Zoro's fingers wrapping around the hilt of one his blades. Soft snick of it popping free that first glittering inch, but fuck if Sanji is going to be intimidated in his own car by this green haired lug.   
  
"What's the matter? Swamp Monster forget how to talk, too?" he goads. A quick glance at the deserted road and then he wrenches the wheel sharp, hard, sudden, sending Zoro off balance and crashing into the back window again. "Don't start shit in here! Just sit back there quietly like the baggage you are. And put your safety belt on, for Chrissake, the last thing we need is to get pulled over by a cop looking to meet his quota. Luffy, too."  
  
"Nagging bitch." But there's the click of guard against scabbard, the katana properly sheathed again. Zoro is twisting and squirming in the back seat, buckling in Luffy and then himself.   
  
"Uppity fuck. Keep your head down, would you? I don't want the rear view mirror to get cracked from reflecting your ugly mug."  
  
~  
  
Somehow they make it to the Baratie with the car and passengers intact. Luffy doesn't even wait for the car to park when they arrive, just flings open his door and slithers out of the seatbelt like he's shedding skin. Zoro at least waits for the car to come to a complete stop, but of course he can't be bothered to say thank you for taxi services. Sanji grinds his teeth on the butt of his cigarette and add the price of a tank of gas to the pair's growing tab. He'll have his revenge one way or another.   
  
"Oi! Wait a minute," he snaps, stopping them before they can scuttle inside like a pair of two-legged roaches. "You've got a mess to clean up." He jabs his cigarette at the gate, sliced halves still hanging loose from the frame of the iron fence. "At least have the manners to throw away your garbage."  
  
Zoro sighs heavily at Sanji's expectant glare, at Luffy's smug little grin. "I'll have to cut the hinges."  
  
"Whatever, just don't wreck the fence."  
  
Sanji makes a big show of turning away and playing with his lighter, but the truth is he's peering through his fringe, watching intently as the green-haired lug plants himself in front of the gate and grips the hilt of a katana. Sanji's dapper appearance hides a long and storied history in which he was exposed to just about every vampiric ability and some of the most exotic combat techniques. He knows his shit. But he has never heard of anything that can cut through an iron gate like it was paper. Melt it, corrode it, twist it, yes. But not slice it as cleanly as Sanji would an onion.  
  
So he's got his gaze glued and-  
  
-and he still misses it. He just sees the ripple of Zoro's shoulder muscles, a blur of movement, and the remains of the hinge-half of the gate start to topple forward, cut loose from its moorings.  
  
It takes a moment for Sanji to realize what this means but when he does the hair at the nape of his neck stands on end, his hands grow cold, and he has to take a long, steadying drag on his cigarette to keep his indifferent façade from cracking like cheap plaster because there was _no use of vampiric power_. Sanji knows how it feels to be around it, was bred and shaped to sense it, and there was nothing, nothing of that in what Zoro has just done. That speed was entirely due to _raw skill_.   
  
What's just as staggering is that there is still nothing supernatural about Zoro catching the piece of gate before it falls. His muscles flex and shift with natural strength, and Sanji's throat goes dry at the thought of how much training this guy must have done to achieve his physique.   
  
And unbidden comes the thought, _Just how strong would this asshole be if he used vampiric power?_  
  
Sanji closes his eyes. He refuses to be scared. Refuses even to be intimidated. This is the moron who couldn't even manage to buy himself a pair of pants, who blushes over his sex life, and (most importantly) who's nose Sanji has broken. He's a mobile bit of bayou glurge with just as much charm as the mud he was born in, and Sanji knows, he _knows_ he can kick the fucker's ass. Brains over brawn, and all that.  
  
"Where do you want these?" Zoro says. His voice is bored and he's holding both halves of the gate, one in each hand. Because of course he is.  
  
"The dumpster on the other side of the building. Go around back." Sanji points to the narrow trail of patio between the restaurant and the waters of the bayou. "We don't want anyone to see you showing off. And don't just toss them on the ground when you get there. The noise'll disturb the customers."  
  
"Yeah, yeah." Zoro sets off into the darkness, grumbling.   
  
Sanji turns away to find Luffy watching him. Sanji asks him, "Where'd Mosshead get the magic swords?"  
  
If that ludicrous speed and strength are human then the only thing letting him slice through the gate must be those blades.   
  
Luffy shrugs. "Dunno. He had 'em when I found him."  
  
Bingo-bingo! Suspicions confirmed and mystery solved. As expected it's nothing more sophisticated than an electric can opener, even if it is powered by magic. Sanji smirks to himself. He knows better then to rely on toys to fight. He's as deadly in the nude as he is clothed.   
  
Some might even say more deadly. His smirk grows and he puts a bit of swagger in his walk, his mind drifting back to the picture of Zoro naked in the crypt. Overcompensating with those two swords? Absolutely.   
  
"C'mon, let's go in and see Miss Nami," he tells Luffy.   
  
Pathetic Swamp Monster is at _least_ half an inch smaller than Sanji.  
  
~  
  
Miss Nami and the shitty old man are waiting for them in the Baratie's employee lounge, a comfortable whitewashed room with battered leather chairs and scarred old tables, overflowing ashtrays and prints of famous chefs on the walls. They sit opposite one another across a low wooden table, a mismatched king and queen on old brown thrones.  
  
Sanji sighs lustily at the sight of Nami in her low-cut peasant blouse and tight bluejeans. Her feet are healed, he's pleased to see, elegant in their strappy sandals, but he's much more taken by the sight of a lock of her copper hair making a perfect curl on the mound of one of her white breasts. He glides toward her, arms outstretched, and declares in his most worshipful tone, "Ah, to see such radiant beauty in the black of night~! Surely this must be a sun goddess come to show mercy on us creatures of darkness!"  
  
He'd have gone on but he's interrupted by Luffy: "If Nami was a sun goddess we'd all melt."  
  
"You'd melt," he snaps back. "Ghouls go in the sun as much as we want, remember?"  
  
"Lucky! I miss playing in the daytime," says Luffy. "It's boring having to sleep so much. Neh, old man. I'm hungry."  
  
Zeff frowns and tugs at his mustache. "Sanji didn't feed you?"  
  
"Sanji fed him three bags of pretzels," grumbles Sanji.   
  
"It's not the _sa~~~me_ ," Luffy whines. "I want blood. Can I go out and get a crocodile?"  
  
"There are only alligators here, Luffy," Nami tells him.   
  
"Do crocodiles and alligators taste different?"  
  
"Ah, well. No? I don't think so?" she says hesitantly.  
  
"Then it doesn't matter what I call them since they're the same. Do you want me to bring you one?"  
  
Sanji kicks him good and hard for that. "Stop trying to feed weird shit to a lady! If Miss Nami is hungry I'll fetch her something from the kitchen."  
  
Zeff rumbles deep in the back of his throat and Sanji flinches guiltily even though he doesn't know why, his head aching in sudden, violent Pavlovian reaction to the sound that's heralded a smack to his skull with a wooden leg for more years than Sanji cares to remember. "You gave the young miss our last bottle of Kaya yesterday night, didn't you?"  
  
Sanji's quick to defend himself with, "A fine lady deserves a fine drink," but it seems Zeff isn't in an indulgent mood.  
  
"You know better than to take the last of anything for your noodling, Eggplant. You'll be paying it back." Zeff strokes his mustache. This time it's not the possibility of a kick that has Sanji flinching, but the smug, satisfied smile on the old geezer's face. "And considering the situation, you might as well do it with the help of these young sprouts."  
  
Miss Nami is like a startled deer with her lovely brown eyes widened in alarm, her graceful limbs trembling. "But Sanji said the price-"  
  
Zeff waves her silent. "I know you're all broke. No, what I want you to do is go investigate why that was our last bottle of Kaya." He heaves himself to his feet. Starts his uneven clumping toward the door. "And then clear up whatever's obstructing production. Sanji can give you the rest of the details about where to go and such - it's not the first time we've had this sort of problem. Meanwhile, I'll get you something to eat. Can't have my errand runners starving. Makes a restaurant look bad."  
  
He disappears out the door, steps tracing out the familiar trail to the kitchen. Sanji can just catch the sounds of the other chefs calling out greetings before the kitchen door shuts and silence returns. He turns his attention back to Miss Nami, but alas, she's caught up in having to explain the obvious to Luffy, who has gone to sit cross-legged on the table beside her.  
  
"-before Sanji gets into Zeff's job for us."  
  
"Rules are boring," Luffy declares, stuffing his finger in his nose.   
  
Nami gives him a ringing slap upside the head. "What did I say about nose picking? And these rules are important so you'd better follow them!"  
  
"Awwwww, Nami~"  
  
"Shut up! You're lucky I'm even bothering to explain this to you." She then softens, crossing her arms, her gaze growing distant. "I'm only doing this because Caitiffs have to stick together. We aren't liked by other vampires."  
  
Luffy is frowning now, his dark eyes searching her face. "Why?"  
  
"Because we're bad luck. But that's not important right now. What's important is the three cardinal rules." She holds up a delicate finger. "First and most important is that you must never, ever let humans know that vampires are real." A second finger joins the first. "Next, you don't kill a vampire by drinking all their blood. That's cannibalism. We call it 'Diablerie'." Three fingers now, pretty pale lines Sanji wants to lick along, have them twine in his hair. "Last is, you don't make new vampires without permission from the Prince."  
  
There's many things she's skipped over, but Sanji keeps his peace. Luffy probably wouldn't understand those, idiot that he is, and the ones Nami's listed are the most important of the lot.   
  
"Now _promise me_ that you are going to follow those rules," she says.  
  
Luffy sighs heavily. "Okay, okay. I promise. I wouldn't want to make new vampires anyway. They'd eat all my food."  
  
At this, Miss Nami smiles, if a little ruefully. "You'll be happy to know that's why the rule is there, since maintaining a proper predator/prey ratio and staying under the threshold of the local murder rate are both important to keeping humans from discovering us. Just make sure when you eat that you hide the evidence, okay?"  
  
She means hide all the evidence of murder. Such a casual, offhanded comment, and the meaning of it, of the words and the implications and the very tone Miss Nami uses sends Sanji spinning back in time to _that_ night, when his sister Raiju had come to him with blood in her mouth and on her hands. She was no longer frozen in her child body as Sanji still was - she'd been allowed to age, and her body had grown impossibly, overwhelmingly _adult_ , her breasts swelled to ripeness and her hips blossomed wide, her limbs lengthened and strengthened.   
  
She'd pressed her alien new body to him, cupped his face in her wet red hands and whispered to him about who she'd killed to gain her adulthood. The kiss she gave him was rich with her own blood, and with every press of lips, every tainted lick of her mouth he loved her more. The nature of a ghoul. And, maybe, of a brother?  
  
It was the night he'd seen her as she truly was: an exquisite monster, a goddess that fed on the sacrifice of blood and souls. It's the truth behind all female vampires, the truth even behind lovely Miss Nami, and the knowledge tears at his heart.  
  
But there's so much more to them than that. Sanji knows. Sanji's seen. In the quiet dark of the house when a ghoul child won't be noticed creeping through corridors, he'd witnessed the other side of Raiju's godhood: listless, lonely weeping. Enslavement to the creature who called himself her father. A blossom twisted until it was nothing but thorns.   
  
Miss Nami shows signs of that same tragedy even as she lectures Luffy and bends him to her will, and Sanji can see traces in her wary gaze, the defensive crossing of her arms when she turns her attention to him.  
  
"So what's this 'Kaya' job about?" The bitter twist at the corner of her mouth tells him she's leery of his answer.    
  
He speaks in his most soothing tone. "We just need to check in with the lady who supplies the blood to make sure nothing's wrong. Her name is Miss Kaya. She's missed the last month of her protection fee."  
  
"Protection fee," Miss Nami repeats, her voice so flat you could use it as a cutting board.  
  
Too late Sanji realizes how it must sound. "It's not a shakedown! It- shit. You know there's not just vampires living in the city, right? There's lots of other things. But not all of them are powerful, so some of them chose to come to the Baratie to make a contract. They pay a monthly fee in blood and they get access to a helpline. If they ever feel they're in trouble, they call here and we send someone to look after them, usually one of fledgling vampires the old man is patronizing. So, Luffy and Zoro, basically."  
  
"And what happens," she asks in that same flat voice, "if Miss Kaya doesn't want to pay anymore?"  
  
Sanji shrugs. "It's happened before. They stop getting access to the helpline and the previous stuff they've given as payment gets a price hike on the menu. It's a service. It's _not_ extortion." He fiddles with a fresh cigarette and his lighter, unsure of how to make her see the truth in his words, how to bring the spark back to her eyes.  
  
It's Luffy who saves him. "Neh, Nami. If you're worried it's a bad thing, the only way to know for sure is to go see it for yourself, right?"  
  
Miss Nami and Sanji both blink at him, stunned to have such sensible words come out of that mouth.   
  
"Ye~s," Nami says slowly. Then, stronger, "Yes. And if I'm going to keep associating with the Baratie then I want to know." She tucks her wayward curl of hair behind her ear. Settles back in her chair. "So tell us more about Miss Kaya."   
  
Luffy fidgets eagerly, slipping his legs over the edge of the table and letting his flip flops dangle from the toe strap as he kicks his feet. "Yeah! You said she's not human but also not a vampire, right? So what is she?"  
  
And ah, the vision that conjures in Sanji's mind: half memory, half dream, all beauty and grace. Miss Kaya's delicate face, a round oval pale as the moon, her hair like starlight, her eyes like shadows. The last time he'd seen her she was a figure carved of the finest alabaster, clothed in spider's silk, crowned in white lilies.   
  
He blows smoke hearts and tells them, "She's a fairy princess." 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, Usopp is a hell of a lot harder for me to write than the others. As such, the chapters are coming a lot slower then I planned. Sorry about that. I hope you enjoy.

It is extremely uncomfortable to crawl through six foot hedges of white roses. It wouldn't normally be a problem for Sir Usopp, Captain of the 11th platoon of Her Majesty's cavalry, but alas, his white stallion sprained a leg just yesterday and his silver armour is at the cleaners after having gotten mustard stains from a hotdog banquet, and now he is forced to go on foot (on belly? He is crawling after all) and dressed in nothing but his tatty jean overalls and a grungy white t-shirt.  
  
He shimmies like a huge lizard in the grass and the dirt, hands reaching ahead of him to push aside the great branches and keep their enormous thorns from gouging- from clawing out his eyes. Yes! Clawing! Because these are demon hedges, birthed and nurtured by a demon sorcerer who has given them claws and fangs of scarlet thorns and an unnatural, insatiable thirst! Usopp can feel it all around him. These hedges, so beautiful with their enormous white flowers, are actually hideous fiends who want nothing more than to poke him and prick him and suck every last drop of his blood until he's just withered raisin of a man!  
  
The fact that the thorns and the roses and the entire hedge are not exactly _real_ is only a slight protection. Because they are also not exactly _not-real_. It all depends on how you look at things.  
  
Usopp is a _master_ of looking at things. You've got to be if you don't want to get killed (again) or eaten ( _again_ ) or set on fire or used in voodoo rituals or get your head blown off by a shotgun or any of a thousand other things that happen in the dark corners of the world. And since Usopp really enjoys not being eaten or set on fire or shot, and especially likes not being killed, he has honed those skills to a fine edge, watching people on endless buss rides and lurking at the back of 24hr dinners and following dog walkers in the park.  
  
He especially likes looking into windows. From a distance they are like paintings. Flat, colourful, two-dimensional. Empty even if you see people - there just isn't enough there to make it real. But when you creep up and look in you can see the details, the living truths that bring the scene to life. The cat toy left on the floor beside the empty takeout containers. The magazines cut to pieces by a crying woman and she pastes together a life of dreams and lies in a scrapbook. The hole punched through the wall by a father who's children all smile and smile and smile, and carefully don't meet each others' eyes.  
  
Kaya's windows are pretty enough at first glance. They should be - she's got one of the old homes on Walnut street, opposite the Audubon golf park. Two stories of red brick and painted green shutters, fronted by a neat little yard of boxwood and shade gardens, big trees and a towering wrought iron fence.  
  
It's a new fence. Very new. Very expensive work, with perfectly straight bars and a huge locked gate, and when you stand on the sidewalk and look in at the windows, really look, they're your first piece of truth: the bars of a cage.  
  
That bit's easy enough to spot. It takes skill like Usopp's to see the rest of it. How the boxwood has not been trimmed but _carved_ , its branches mercilessly reshaped into an impossible maze where your body can wander in and out and your memories stay trapped forever. How the trees have been hollowed out so dead things can live inside the trunks, their eyes peering at you from in between the crevasses of bark. How someone has put horseshoes over the door _upside down_ to let all the luck run out.  
  
How the great white rose hedges spilling through the fence have an entire other world hidden in the shadows of their leaves.  
  
That's how Usopp gets in: by crawling under an arch of thorns that may or may not be real into a world of maybes and perhapses and truths too terrible to exist beside Everyday's white lies. It isn't really there and so neither is Usopp, and he can move past the bars of the fence and into the twisting labyrinth of hedges and wet red glyphs. False turns on every side. Blood on flagstone paths. This place is full of hate and black magic.  
  
The cuts from living wood sting and bite on Usopp's hands and arms. He rubs dirt from his face. Looks around. Swallows with a dry throat. Oh god, is it supposed to be that dry? He's a vampire. Do they get dry throats? Maybe something's wrong with him. Maybe the rose thorns have become poisonous. They're a sorcerer's roses and they're not even real so why not be impossibly poisonous to the dead?  
  
He has to _check_. He has to _know_. He picks at the cuts on his arm, peels away skin to let himself bleed and see if it's red of venom-green, picks and digs and scrapes at his flesh, trying to get it out, get it out, get it out, out, out, until his fingers have dug in to the first knuckle and catch on his tendons and he struggles with himself, trapped by his own body. His gaze darts frantically about the twisting corridors of leaves around him. Nothing but shadow paths and dead ends and there is _no way out-!_  
  
He's backing away from the horror around him when his back hits the maze wall. He jerks with surprise, so violently it yanks his fingers free, and he scatters a great arc of his own blood before him.  
  
He stands bleeding for several long moments before he realizes that the blood spatter makes a lopsided smiley face.  
  
It makes him laugh. A little amused. A lot ashamed.  
  
_You're eighth generation_ , he tells himself. _Eighth generation and a child of a badass vampire! You can totally do this. You've done it lots of times before. And if you really are poisoned and gonna die then at least go do it in Princess Kaya's arms._  
  
He rubs his bloody hands on his overalls. His forearm is already healing, proof of his blood and his power, and his hands barely tremble, his knees are steady as can be, and anyway even if they are shaky that's just after effects of the poison that wasn't even on the thorns so he can just. stop. thinking about it now.  
  
He wrenches his attention back to the task at hand. Before him eight different paths twist off into the shrubbery, a series of beckoning arches and dark tunnels. Each one is different - one is lined with mirror shards strung from twine, another's path is traced out in blood, a third is a tunnel of branches barely large enough to wiggle through, a forth has skulls for paving stones.  
  
The secret is that each one is also the same - a lie. A really _good_ lie. Who doesn't believe that you have to pick a path to get through a maze? But Usopp is a master of lies and he knows that you never trust that first impression.  
  
There's a lot of other options here. Climbing, digging, flying, burning. But again it's all wrong. You do that and you're still playing by false rules.  
  
No, the real secret, the truth so carefully hidden, is one that comes naturally to an insightful genius like Usopp.  
  
He turns around and goes back the way he came. Because that's a path, too. The ninth path, his own path, the path of insight and common sense and not having to bother with the big scary maze at all because fuck that. This maze isn't real and this space isn't real, and if you know that like Usopp does, if you can squeeze between the lies and balance on that delicate thread of truth, you can tightrope walk across the chasm of existence.  
  
Arms outstretched, chilled fingers spread wide, he puts one foot in front of the other. His toes curl around the slender fragment of taxes-mailman-potholes-drying paint-laundry-phone bills-flossing, the banality of every day life a path to carry him over the infinite depths of the unknown and unknowable.  
  
_You can't eat me because you're not real_ , he thinks at the thousand-fold eyes peering up at him. _And even if you were real I'm not actually here and also I taste bad and am high in cholesterol and have really nasty side effects like nasal discharge and gastro-intestin-aaaaaahhhhhhhhh! AHHHHHHHH,_ howls his mind as the emptiness below him surges and churns and yawns wide, stretching its jaws and flashing obsidian teeth.  
  
Usopp is dead and so his heart doesn't beat and he misses it so much in times like these. The rabbit-thump of life in his ribcage and the burn of air through his lungs were comforting, ordinary sensations. Here in this place of truth he is alone with his mind and his soul and he doesn't much like either of them. Cowards. Just like him.  
  
_But me, myself, and I are the only friends Princess Kaya has! She's counting on us! We can't give up here!_  
  
The image of her face blooms in his mind. She'd been drawn and haggard last time he saw her, the fingerprints of suffering on her face: dark bruising under her eyes, worry-lines carved between the delicate arch of her brows, a frown weighting down her lips even when she tried to smile. Her hair, once a halo of moonlight, was tangled and lank. Her gown was no longer silk and spiderweb but worn cotton, faded in the wash. And most troubling of all, she was starting to _forget_.  
  
'Imagine, the daughter of a pair of pediatricians being a princess. It's ridiculous, right? Unbelievable. Even I can't believe it.'  
  
'Fairy stories again. Do you have to keep telling them, Usopp? It seems almost cruel of you to call me a princess when I'm so pathetic.'  
  
'Sometimes I wish you wouldn't visit. You make me want to believe even when I know it's all lies.'  
  
Usopp's bottom lip quivers. He bites it, sinks his fangs into himself without mercy. Tears aren't something he can afford when walking above starving nightmares. Instead he forces himself to recite the long litany of his favourite bus stops, forging a chain of memories of every day places, mental pictures of wet newspaper and discarded soda cans, cigarette butts, forgotten umbrellas.  
  
Bored, the living void underneath him settles back into torpor.  
  
Usopp tells himself he doesn't care.  
  
It isn't real anyway.  
  
~  
  
When Usopp steps back into reality he's past the white rose hedge and the boxwood maze, tucked against the red bricks of the house and deep in the shadow of a monster.  
  
It looms above him, wrapped in the skin of an oak, the branches rewoven into massive jaws lined with leafy fangs. It shifts as it registers his presence, the low creak of wood like a warning growl as it twists and flexes, unnatural movement forced on the tree's flesh by the creature living within.  
  
The craggy grey bark ripples. Cracks open and close, hungry mouths with wooden fangs, and Usopp eyes them nervously, rubs his hands together and feels out the length of each finger. They still ache at the first joint where they'd been neatly severed when he'd carelessly tried to climb the Tree, the tips bitten off and swallowed, his blood everywhere and his screams rousing the neighbours, and then it had shaken loose a wasp nest and dropped it on his head. Who knew getting stung would still hurt as a vampire?  
  
His hands start to scratch at the skin of his arms and he makes fists to keep them still, clenches his jaws so tight his teeth squeal. There's no need for that because he made sure, he made _sure_ that those wasps hadn't laid any eggs in him, used his fangs to rip himself open since his fingers were still ruined, slow to heal from a wound of magic and wood.  
  
That had been his first attempt at seeing Princess Kaya and it was also nearly his last. But his hands had healed thanks to the incredible power of his vampiric blood (and never mind that he's pretty sure he got his fingerprints backward) and he'd been back as soon as he could bring himself to step into the shadows of the white rose hedge.  
  
Usopp isn't about to let some overgrown weed stand between himself and Princess Kaya.  
  
Now, normally he would have cut down the Tree with his golden axe, but he has lent it out to a deserving farm boy who had dropped his own axe in the river, and so Usopp's forced to use a slightly more diplomatic solution.  
  
"I have come-" His voice squeaks and breaks, forcing him to pause. He coughs. Clears his throat. Vampire puberty is always so embarrassing. He tries again. "I come have to climb you again, Tree. And you'd better not give me any trouble about it."  
  
The oak leaves rustle. A lesser person, one without Usopp's masterful insight, might think it was a contemptuous little flick of greenery, but Usopp knows that's just a front to hide the tree's fear. It knows that he has unlocked all of its deepest secrets, seen it for what it truly is.  
  
Because never mind that it was born from a child's crayon drawing and tears, that it has been brought here and bound here with magic. In the end this nasty, twisted spirit is nothing more than a bully. It feeds on misery and blood and stolen kites, takes pleasure in the little cruelties it inflicts, the power games, the humiliation of those it considers beneath it. It's an existence that is, in the end, all too human, easy to understand in its sullen pettiness.  
  
And easy to manipulate, if you know how.  
  
"If you cooperate, I'm willing to give you . . . _this!_ " With a flourish, he pulls a card from his overalls' front pocket. It glitters even in the dim murk of the city's night, holographic foil highlighting the sinuous curves of the cartoon dragon printed on it. "Behold! The ultra-rare, limited edition, foil embossed Hydramon! Desired by kids everywhere and up until yesterday evening the beloved treasure of Emily desMarches."  
  
Usopp smirks as the low creak of wood betrays the Tree's interest. "You can feel it, right? How loved this is?" He waves the trading card. Sing-songs, "She's been sleeping with it under her pillow~~"  
  
The Tree shivers. Slowly, subtly, it leans toward Usopp.  
  
"If it isn't returned to her she'll probably cry herself sick. Ah, I can see her now," Usopp continues, sighing theatrically and clutching his hands together. "Her cute little face will get all messy with tears and snot. I bet she'll have a screaming fit, too, and maybe blame her sister for stealing the card. Two kids miserable for the price of one!"  
  
At least, that's probably what would have happened if Usopp hadn't left the foil card for Hydramon's evolution, Glaciamon, in its place under Emily's pillow. Not that he, a mighty eighth generation vampire, cares about some snivelling little mortal, but he _just so happened_ to have found Glaciamon in the forty-third school lost-and-found he had ransacked while looking for, uh . . . headphones? Headphones sounds believable, right?  
  
_But none of that matters_ , because just the idea of unhappy kids makes the Tree moan, a low, unnatural sound of lust, and this time it's not a slight shiver but a convulsive shudder of leaf and branch, the bark churning as hundreds of wooden mouths masticate, salivating sticky sap.  
  
"Same deal as always? You let me climb you and I'll give you this to eat."  
  
The crack of wood heralds the Tree's answer, the trunk splitting open to reveal the vertical slash of a mouth more awful than any of the others: taller than Usopp, hideous and impossible in its sudden meaty gape, no longer masked in wood and bark but showing the spirit's true nature of glistening flesh and poisonous ichor and snaggled yellowed teeth.  
  
Usopp gingerly tosses in the trading card.  
  
The Tree gives a gloating little chuckle as it chews up yet another child's treasure. It smacks its non-existent lips, then straightens up, shifting its limbs to make a rough ladder for Usopp to climb. Up he scampers, cringing the whole time at how skin-warm and fleshy-giving the bark is under his hands.  
  
He yips and yanks his left hand back. Rubs it furiously on his overalls to get the sticky sap off and does his best to ignore the Tree's sniggering. The nasty creature licked his palm.  
  
_It's not poisonous, it's_ not _poisonous,_ he tells himself, and keeps climbing.  
  
Princess Kaya's window is finally in reach.  
  
~  
  
From far away Princess Kaya's windows are some of the loveliest paintings Usopp has ever seen, framed with red brick and green shutters. A pastel dream inside a gingerbread house. Up close like this, though, they are hideous caricatures.  
  
What should have been a pretty bedroom in lilac and cream is instead a cave painted in corpse colours. The greyed-out peach of dead flesh on the walls, the carpet ivory like old bones, the mottled bedspread a field of fresh bruises. The pillows are overstuffed, bloated, and the stool set off in one corner is slanted just so, ready to collapse the moment someone forgets themselves and relaxes. The little lamp by the bedside is dim, throwing shadows instead of light. And everywhere around the room are artificial flowers.  
  
Usopp shudders. Those terrible, horrible silk flowers. Gone dusty with neglect and faded with time (though they are new, brand new, like the fence and the Tree and the sickness in these walls,) they have been wrapped around the brass bedposts and wreathed about the lamp, strewn across the top of the chest of drawers.  
  
Cold blue and cement grey and the faded violet of mildew, they are the colours of sadness. They are perfumed with despair. They are the finger marks in a abused child's flesh, dark streaks of colour fading and dying, easily overlooked and covered up with excuses (just playing, rough and tumble, you know how kids are) but so obvious if you want to see.  
  
They are the work of that bastard, Klahadore, and if Usopp had his way every single petal would burn, and Klahadore with them.  
  
Because just as he's given he's taken as well. Every book from the shelves, every picture from the wall. No television, no toys, not even blank pages to scribble on. This room is barren of everything except ugliness and its faded, fragile victim.  
  
Princess Kaya sits crosslegged on her bed, skinny limbs folded in on themselves, sickly pale even against the smudge grey of her ugly sweatpants and t-shirt, her short blonde hair no longer luminous but stringy and tangled. Her mouth hangs half-open, her eyes are wide and vacant. In this moment she seems as empty as the room around her.  
  
Usopp's hands tremble against the bark of the Tree's branch, his teeth chatter until he clenches his jaw to make them stop. He has to pry his fingers lose from their death grip joint by joint but he makes himself do it because now is not the time to give in to fear. Now is the time to fight.  
  
He has seen this too many times before. He refuses to sit idle and let another fairy -least of all _this_ fairy- rot away and die.  
  
So what if Klahadore is strong? So what if he can warp reality and turn plants into monsters and hang horseshoes upside down over windows? Usopp can do that, too! Well, he can do the last one, and he can also hang them right side up! So there! And anyway, even if he's without silver armour and white stallion and golden axe, he can still fight. Hasn't he crept through the white hedge rose and solved the dark maze and tamed the evil Tree?  
  
He brings his hands up and slaps himself in the face. The sharp pain is grounding and the tears from having hit himself too hard will clear the dust from his eyes. He reaches up above Princess Kaya's window and boldly twists the horseshoe above the window until it's the right way, a sunny smiling U to keep the luck in, and then raps on the window.  
  
Princess Kaya doesn't move.  
  
_Oh god. Oh god, oh god, oh god. Is she-? Did I come too late-?_  
  
He tries again, harder, louder.  
  
Very slowly, she blinks.  
  
He has to bite back a cheer. Tells himself his fresh tears are from allergies and bangs on the window some more. He'd break the cursed bit of glass it if he could, but he'll settle for getting Princess Kaya up and moving.  
  
She stumbles a little as she makes her way to the window, moving like she isn't too sure who's arms and legs she's using, but her eyes have come alive, and when he smiles at her she smiles back and shuffles forward a little faster.  
  
Her thin fingers tremble on the window case as she scrabbles at the lock. She has to twist in on herself, force it with all the strength left in her body, but he doesn't dare try to help her. He gets through the spells on technicalities and loopholes. Opening a window is way too close to trying to force his way in - there's no telling what nasty surprises are in store for him if he tries.  
  
Finally, with a hiss of protest, the fancy aluminium frame gives way and the window goes shuddering upward.  
  
Usopp wrinkles his nose as the stale air of the bedroom gushes out. The scent of fake potpourri is overwhelming, a chemical tribute to the death of a field of roses.  
  
"I know," says Kaya. "It is pretty strong, isn't it? But Klahadore says it's good for me. Aromatherapy. He says it'll help me sleep better."  
  
Usopp knows better than to argue by now. He is a teller of lies and an outsider in the most literal sense. He's got no way of winning against beloved Klahadore, trusted personal therapist and honey-tongued sorcerer. So instead Usopp says, "As long as it helps you. You know I just want to see you get better."  
  
Princess Kaya smiles again, but it's wobbly and lopsided, and instead of taking her usual place on the window seat she stays standing. Her hands claps together, fingers working, twining, twitching, the white legs of a spider. She looks away from him. Hides behind the curtain of her hair as she speaks. "About that . . . Usopp. Klahadore and I have been talking, and . . . and he doesn't think it's good for me to meet with you like this. He says it gets me too excited. My . . . my health is so bad now. He says I have to stay calm. That I have to stay quiet."  
  
Quiet. Always quiet. A 'rest cure' is what Klahadore calls it. No TV, no books, no writing or drawing or friends to visit. No going out and no exercise, and as little talking as possible because all of that will make Princess Kaya excited, overheat her brain and give her more of those awful migraines that she's had since the death of her parents (since that bastard moved in.)  
  
Klahadore promised a cure for those headaches with no medications, no harmful chemicals to mess with the body, no scientific mumbo jumbo looking to swindle you out of your inheritance with expensive treatments. Just healthy, natural rest. Endless, _suffocating_ rest.  
  
_So calm and quiet you might as well be dead_ , thinks Usopp bitterly. _He's burying you alive in your own house, and you know it and I know it but you refuse to see and I don't know how to make you admit it._  
  
He's just no good with the truth.  
  
But lies have their own power, and through them, so does he.  
  
He grins, sunny and wide (and a lie) and says, "Don't worry about that! I picked a really nice story. A bedtime story. All you have to do is sit and listen. There's nothing more restful than that, right?"  
  
She brightens a little, a moon reflecting his light. ". . . that's true." She hesitates. Admits in a sudden rush, "And I like your stories. I really do. They remind me of . . . of something. Of feelings from before." Her voice low and a little cracked. "I forget how _tired_ I am when I'm with you. I forget . . . I forget . . . "  
  
The sound of a car driving up drowns out the rest of her confession. Door opening and closing. Talking. Usopp frowns and looks over his shoulder at the street.  
  
A little black sports car has parked in front of Princess Kaya's home. Three people, strangers, have step out of it. Usopp has to squint leaves to see them, but they're standing in the puddle of streetlight's yellow glow, so he can at least pick out a few details. A tall, lanky blond man in a dark suit. A redhead woman in jeans and pale top. A wiry little guy in tank top and shorts and a straw hat.  
  
"Are you expecting someone?" Usopp whispers to Princess Kaya.  
  
She shivers and wraps her arms about herself. "N-no. And Klahadore isn't, either. Do you . . . think they're house robbers?"  
  
"No. They don't look right for that." If anything, they look like friends who've gotten lost on the way to the bar. They kinda sound like it, too, their voices carrying clearly through the still night air.  
  
"-the hell did he managed to get lost?!" The blond snarls. "It's a straight path with the swamp on one side and the building on the other!"  
  
"Yeah, Zoro's stupid like that. But don't worry, he'll find us. He always comes back to me," says the guy in the straw hat.  
  
The woman is by the gate, peering into the grounds. "I hope he hurries. This place gives me the creeps."  
  
"There's no need to rely on that moron, sweet Nami. I'll protect you with my life," carols the blond.  
  
"Uh huh, that's nice, Sanji. Are you sure Kaya lives here?"  
  
Sanji. The name makes something stir in Usopp's memory, but before he can chase it down the rest of the words register not just with him, but with the Princess.  
  
"Did they just say my name?" she asks. Curious, she leans out the window.  
  
And the magical wards about the building _howl_.


End file.
